Lucky Bunny (9780062202512) (6 page)

W
eeks go by and it doesn't feel so strange. There are noises at last. I hear owls hooting at night and guns going off in the morning, and the clang of a milk pail. There's thunder sometimes and the horse whinnying at night, and the rattle of the honey-spinner in the kitchen and the thump thump thump of Bert chopping wood and the dog barking tied up outside the house and the swish of Elsie sweeping. We get a bit used to it, I suppose. Bobby more than me. Bert teaches Bobby to shoot rabbits. At night, Bobby teases me, lying on his side in the dark to sing: “
Run rabbit run rabbit run run run run . . . don't let the farmer use his gun . . .”

But what about Bunny? “Poor rabbits,” I say to Bobby. “I ain't never going to eat them . . . you're just mean.”

They wake Bobby up when the air's all crackly and dark, to work on the Campaign. We work out what the Campaign is: they just mean help in the fields picking up the sugar beets, walking behind the horse with this long sharp thing, poking it at the sugar beets, and then chucking the smelly things into the back of the tractor. But I refuse to do it, scream and shout when Bert tries to wake me, flap my arms and then go all stiff so he can't get me out of bed, and has to give up on me.

Later that morning I put my coat on over my nightie and go out into the fields—Bert calls it the Fen—to see what they're doing: Bert sitting on another kind of cart that the horse is dragging and Bobby lifting and picking and throwing into the big box behind him. Bobby's cheeks are pink, and the tips of his ears, too, and his eyes shine. He wants me to laugh at the beets with him, see how rude they look, dirty and pointy, like a giant pile of big rude willies. But I turn around and stomp back indoors. I don't want to see Bert and Bobby take them to the river to heap them on the boats. I'm going back to bed.

Elsie has been calling me, so I put my head under the pillow. She shouts that my breakfast has been on the table for hours and it's stone cold now and she'll throw it in the bin if I don't come soon. I'm hungry, I'm
so
hungry, but I can't seem to make myself get up. I think I fall asleep again: I'm sure Elsie must have thrown it in the bin by now. Somewhere, between falling asleep and hearing her call, I think she said she'd wallop the hide off me.

Next time I wake up, it feels like it could be dinnertime. The sky is bright in the window, and I stand and stare out until a spider falls onto my shoulder and startles me. I brush it off and it plops to the floor like a tangle of brown cotton and suddenly I feel a bit more awake, so I get up and put a jumper on, hoping that Elsie might have gone out. I tiptoe down the stairs, but I can hear her, pounding something in a bowl, and I want to go right back upstairs again but she's heard me, and now she's out in the hall, and shouting again.

“If you're not going to help Bert, come and help me in here; you can't spend all day in bed . . .”

“I want to go to school. Ain't there no school in the country? I like school,” I tell her, from halfway down the stairs. Not too close to the open kitchen door. I can hear the radio but it doesn't sound cozy.

Elsie comes into the hall to look at me, still holding the bowl and spoon.

“School? School's six miles away. No one goes to school when the Campaign's on. You're needed
here
.”

She gives me a brush and a bucket, and pushes me out towards the backyard. I spy my breakfast on the table, a plate of stuck-on bacon and eggs, but she's already flicking it into the pig bucket, with nasty scraping noises. I won't show her that I mind.

O
ne teatime, weeks later—well, I
think
it's weeks, but who knows? We don't have calendars or newspapers and we've no idea really how long we've been here; it feels like forever and the nights are getting dark at five o'clock and the blackberries we find are small and screwed up, like old men's faces. Anyhow, one time, Elsie makes us a pie and it has plums in it, so sour that I can hardly eat them. I take the stones out and put them on the side of the plate, counting them up
. “What shall I be? Lady, baby, gipsy, queen. What shall I wear? Silk, satin, cotton, rags.”

Elsie hears me and says, “Eat up your pie.”

“It's nasty,” I say, without meaning to.

“Nasty?” Elsie whirls around and snatches the plate from under my nose.

“So grand, aren't we?” she says.

I'm still counting stones.
“How shall I get my wedding clothes? Given, borrowed, bought, stolen.”

“We have bread and jam for breakfast,” I say. It's just me and Elsie—the others aren't here—but she acts like I haven't spoken.

“My dad's got this proper shop called Cookes Eel Pie and Mash Shop. In Dalston. My dad's the boss of it. My nan says it's the Buckingham Palace of mash shops. When you go in you can see the eels in this wooden drawer at the back, all alive and wiggling. You can catch them with a little net and eat as many as you like. Well, I can. Or we can, me and Bobby. Because our dad's the boss.”

“I thought your family owned a stables? Pie and mash shop now, is it?”

Elsie stands with her back to me, so that I'm staring at the tied string of her red-checked pinny and her grey-skinned elbow. I wait for a minute, chewing my lip, and then say, “Both.” When she says nothing to this, I add, “And I can go in anytime I want. And I can eat how many I want, with parsley sauce,” and that's it, that does it, at last. Elsie whirls around and says in a strange voice, “You're funny.”

This is the first time she's really looked at me. She crouches on the kitchen floor in front of me with her knees creaking and wiping her hands on her pinny, and looks hard into my face. I feel scared, but I don't blink, or move away. I feel glad, too. I wanted to know how bad Elsie could be, and now she's going to show me.

“I heard your baby sister died. I heard your mum's a drunk and can't look after you, and your dad's—well, the less said about where
he
is, the better, eh,
Queenie
?”

I kick her then. Not a hard kick. I run at her and just stab at what I can reach. I'm short, and my leg flings out, and I'm not even wearing shoes so it's just my foot bumping up against her fat woolly stockings. Still, it does the trick. She limps off out of the open kitchen door and towards Bert, out in the yard to where Bert and Bobby are now fiddling with some farm machinery, fixing something. The black dog chained up outside barks and strains, his mouth dribbling. His eyes are red and he's a Fen Dog, Bert says. You should Watch Him.

I hear Elsie's voice, out in the yard. Nasty like those geese that first day. She's had enough of the little townie bastards. Bert will have to get himself into Ely and talk to that old mawther, the billeting lady. They've tried human charity. They've tried home cooking. Out of the goodness of their hearts, they've let those East End slum kids into their home. But, I ask you. Enough is enough.

I run inside and grab my case from under the bed. My heart is pumping. I'm sure Bobby will be cross with me, because in some funny way, he seems to like Bert. Or like doing things with Bert, who says so little and lets you be around him, as long as you're working. And Bert is in the same mood every day: calm. Pipe smoking and slow talking.

With a wild feeling, a funny feeling, strong and strange like the way I felt towards that house at the bottom of Fore Hill when we first arrived, like a memory when it couldn't really be a memory yet, I suddenly picture something I saw in Elsie's bathroom. She didn't let us go in there, but I'd sneaked in one day. I hated the lavatory outside with the squares of newspaper hanging on a nail and all the spiders . . . I wanted to see Elsie's proper lavatory, and her best china jug and bowl with the blue flowers on, for washing in. So I snuck in, and there on a little dish was a bar of pure white soap, just sitting there like a princess on a throne. When I put my face up close to it, it smelled even better than it looked. It smelled of all my favorite things: lemons and roses and cleanness and specialness, of Betsy my perfect white pony (yes, pony, surely that was the word I wanted before?), of Bunny and her silky ribbons, and Nan's parma-violet cheeks, and money.

I'm chucking my gas mask into its box, into my case, and that makes me remember Miss Clarkson saying that you need soap to stop the lens misting up. And if we're going to see Nan again she'll need some soap, won't she, for her gas mask. The bar in my hand is cool, smooth. I think it must be brand new. There are no suds on it, or black veins in it, like the only soap I've seen before.

That phrase. East End slum kids. Hearing it made my skin prickle. Then I felt something else. Not
shamed,
as Bobby always called it. No, not me.

She hates us. She can tell we're poor and she hates us. I don't know how she can tell because I didn't tell her but somebody must have done. I picture Elsie's skin, its scaled redness. Outdoor skin, hard and nasty. Elsie doesn't need it, does she? Nothing will make
her
beautiful. But lovely Nan, with her soft crumpled face. Nan, at home right now, knitting and clacking her gobstoppers. I close my eyes and I can see Nan so clearly, lifting up the soap and sniffing it and smiling. Yes. This lovely perfect thing is surely hers?

S
o we arrive back at the billeting lady's house, and because there are so many unhappy children, and unhappy people looking after them, it seems quite a few of us are going home. She can't think what else to do with Bobby and me, she says, if a decent home like the Salmons' at Drove Farm isn't good enough for us.

(We've never heard Elsie and Bert's name before. “Salmon's a fish!” Bobby says. That explains it then. She was a cold fish, with scaly red skin, not an apple after all.)

“Didn't you even like the horse?” the billeting lady asks, fetching her whistle and getting us to line up outside her front door. “Mr. Salmon's the best horseman in the Fens. You were spoiled indeed. I was so touched when he brought that splendid Suffolk Punch with him to show you, that very first day—how kind was that?—and I remember neither of you batted an eyelid . . .”

I'm not listening to her. I'm surprised to hear from some of the others now marching down Fore Hill in a crocodile towards the station, that they've had letters, sixpenny postal orders and even visits from
their
mums and dads. It's cold now, and the leaves aren't conker-colored; they're gone altogether, just skeleton trees. It's hard to hear what Peggy Burchwell is saying, but I can make out the tune, and I know the words. It's “
Build a bonfire, build a bonfire, put the teachers at the top. Put Miss Clarkson in the middle and we'll burn the blinkin' lot
” until we get to Ely station and are allowed to mill about a bit, like a bag of marbles that's been opened. We can roll out and bump into each other.

Archie Markham is carrying a funny thing that's as big as him. It looks like a vase made out of a basket, which Bobby is jealous of, because it's an eel hive and Archie can use it back home to catch eels; the man he's been staying with is an eel catcher and he let Archie bait the hives with dead cats and rats and horrible stuff like that, and this makes Bobby more and more jealous, until Bobby says, “If your eel catcher likes you so much why is he sending you back?” And then Archie bursts into tears and they start a fight, which they have both missed a lot.

Archie tells Bobby that he smells of beets and farts and they laugh and make up.

Archie whoops then—he's spied some Beech-Nut on the floor. He shares it with us, biting the piece in three, and then says that anyway this is only a “phony war,” and hasn't been a war at all, no bombs falling, all our families are hunky-dory. We've only been away three months. We'll be back in time for Christmas.

That word though. Bombs. I've managed not to think about them until now. Bobby and Archie love talking about them, running about with their arms out, like airplanes, making bombing noises. Is our house—Nan, I can't think of Nan—all blasted to the ground then or bursting into flames? My fingers curl around the bar of soap in my pocket. I lift my hand to my nose to secretly sniff the silky smell and then hold it again, feeling its smoothness, turning it over and over. How happy Nan is going to be with me. She'll never want to leave, or go anywhere at all, after she's got the soap.

And then—horrible!—here's Elsie bustling onto the platform in her dreaded camel coat. We're on the train, we're just sitting down, the billeting lady is going to travel to London with us, and she stands up as she sees Elsie, and rushes to the window, lifting the curtain and pushing the window down: I think she's worried that it's something important, something forgotten. But I know what it is and my heart nearly stops. Elsie's found out. She's coming to get her blinkin' soap back! I clasp my hand tightly around it and begin singing, loudly as I can, so that no one will hear what Elsie is saying:
I'm going to hang out the washing on the Siegfried line!

The guard blows his whistle and the train slides away. When I look down, the tracks are blurring into lines. Elsie is hurrying beside us on the platform, mouthing something and waving, but it's hard for her to keep up. She doesn't give up. She's breathless and redder than ever and at last I hear what she's saying, just as the train is picking up speed.

“Bert! Uncle Bert sends you his love! He says goodbye.”

What, she ran all the way to tell us that?

Elsie's round face through the window is strange, worried. I remember that when I first met her I didn't think her expression unfriendly. She has big eyes, chocolate-drop color, like her dog's. I see in them now something very puzzling, a thing I've not seen in anyone's eyes before. Mum has never looked at me like that. Nan has no reason to. Although it's new to me, I suddenly know exactly what it is, and a feeling like a spanner turning over in my stomach locks it away. I think it's going to be useful to me. I'm going to store it up. Like the way I know who is hiding the ball behind their back, in the Queenie game. My way of reading people. Ah, I think. I want to smile. Elsie feels guilty. That's what
guilty
looks like. Even so. That Lux soap is in my pocket.