Mr Mac and Me (24 page)

That night Mother fries the eel with our last precious onions, and serves it up with mashed potato and a pale green sauce of sorrel. It smells so good even Father comes to the table, and we bend our heads and listen as he tells us, as if he’s not told us before, that if it wasn’t for Sir Bly’s pig-headedness, he might have built a smokehouse out by the side of the inn. ‘I could have smoked these eels, and any others that you cared to catch,’ he says. ‘We could have gone in together and made money.’

I look at him, but I don’t mention that it’s not Sir Bly who makes the rules. It is the government who has declared no new buildings can be built while we’re at war. Why do you think, I want to ask him, as I pull the backbone from the eel, that Charles Rennie Mackintosh himself is here, in our village, painting flowers, when he might be off, anywhere in the world, building palaces and spires? I wonder about the cathedral that he designed for Liverpool. Were there birds secreted amongst its towers? And I wonder too if after the war, he’ll make new buildings to replace the old ones that have been destroyed, and if he does, whether he’ll take our village with him and press its grasses and its twigs into the walls.

I help Mother clear the table, and scrub out the pots, and when all is done, and I’ve looked in on Ann, I step out into the night. It’s not dark. That’s the first thing I notice. It’s after seven and the sky is pale with light. I walk towards the common. It’s higher here, and the stars are nearer your hand. When I reach the tufted heather of the heath I lie down. Spring fever, I’ve heard them call it. But whatever it is I can feel it in my blood. A restlessness. A hope. I scan the sky, stretching my eyes, further, up beyond the clouds. Where are they? I ask myself. Are they looking down? And I search for my brothers in the shapes that wing above me. But it’s not them I see, but the old witch-woman, her sharp nose marked out by the Milky Way, and I close my eyes and still I see her, sitting in a cabin with her hunger and her fleas. She’s in the woods on the other side of Dunwich Forest, and I stand up and begin walking, knowing even as I start that it’s too far. I follow the railway line until it closes in towards the road, and cross it below the corner where two smugglers – long ago – were strung up on gibbets for their crimes.

I hurry along a sheep path, the marsh whispering white on either side, the sky a black dome above. The later it gets the brighter it becomes, the moon a night away from fullness, the stars so sharp they burn. I’m sure I’ve never seen so many stars, thousands of them, millions, and the harder I look, the more of them I see, bursting out from the unfolding skies behind. If I can find the witch, I tell myself, she’ll explain what she meant when she told Ann that she’d be married. She and Jimmy Kerridge. And I run my hand up inside my sleeve to feel the soft edge of the moles that she discovered there. Liar. My mouth is bitter. Letting her think it was a sailor that she’d have. And I wonder, did she plant those moles on me, like the black spots that are delivered to pirates, did she tell Ann what she most wanted to hear for the sake of some tatters and a herring?

I’m on the edge of Dunwich, by a glade of larches, beyond which for mile after mile the woods stretch in a dark streak along the coast. Now I’ve come this far, I falter in my purpose, but I go on anyway, roaming along the lane that leads into the village, and out again down the high street, where cottages huddle together, their latticed windows and porched doors keeping the forest out. I skirt past the lepers’ church and the Ship Inn, and trudge back up towards the wooden house where Father had his pork butcher’s in the shed beside. The waves are lapping at the cliffs, and the ruins of All Saints stand out black against the sky. They say it won’t be long now before the church tower drops into the sea, and Mother has told me that when she was a child there were twice as many headstones in the churchyard, and I think of them splitting off from their moorings and sliding down the cliff into the sea. I shiver. The wind is creeping in across the marsh. ‘I’ll not find her tonight,’ I tell myself, although I’ve always known I wouldn’t. And slowly, tired, I stamp back towards home. But with the wind come clouds, and soon whole swathes of sky are blotted out. A hill rises before me, dissolving through the blackness into a bush, and the ghostly flank of a muntjac slides away into a copse. I can no longer see the shoreline that has guided me this far, and I take a wrong track and come out high on the lane above the Hoist. But I’m so grateful to have my bearings I hurry past Dead Man’s Corner with hardly a nod, and crossing back over the edge of the marsh I head for the spire of our church.

I’m running downhill now towards home, hoping I’ve not been missed, when I hear a low rumble, humming in from the sea. I stop. There’s nothing there, just the roar of thunder through the cloud, but I wait all the same, staring upwards, straining to see, and there it is, the round belly of a Zeppelin, directly overhead. The noise fills the whole sky. The camouflage of cloud is gone, and I cover my face in case it sees me, as it travels like a second moon, following the railway line inland. Through the slats of my fingers I let it go, and I stay like that, alone in the street, until the noise has faded to a purr.

The inn is quiet when I let myself in, the last customer, used now to the rules of Dora, having long gone home. I peer into the main bar. All is neat and orderly, and treading through the snug I pull myself up the ladder. Father is asleep, and Mother, to guard against his snores, lies with one arm over her ear.

I’m so tired that for a moment I forget, and I stop on the step of my room, and stare at the empty bed. The sheet is turned down, the pillow smooth, and the fact of it pounds into me, I’m on my own. I take off my jacket and crawl into the cold, and I’m lying there, my arms around myself, when I hear the Zeppelin turn.

The engine roar is low at first, but it gathers as it nears, and soon I can feel the airship pressing down, its body pinning me to my bed. What can it be that’s called it back? Have we been careless? Is our washing out? Are the geese too white against the village green? I hold my breath. The noise is deafening – it must be directly overhead. Where are the searchlights? Where is the constable who shot Danky in the leg? And then there is a hiss like a stone falling and a thud that shakes the earth. It’s not possible. They couldn’t . . . And there is another explosion. Nearer this time. And as it dies away, so does the roar of the Zeppelin, moving out across the sea.

I’d get up but I’m too scared. I think of the airmen shaking each other’s hands, laughing to think they ever bothered risking their lives for London when they could cut their journey short and drop their bombs on us.

‘Tommy?’ It is Mother in her nightdress, standing in the door. ‘Tom?’ and together we hurry through to the good room where Ann lies undisturbed and palely still, as sound asleep as she ever was.

‘Ann,’ I kneel down beside her. I take her chill hand, but Mother has run back into her own room and I can hear her, cursing and crying, as she shakes Father from his sleep.

Chapter 46

Bombs it seems are good for business. The next day as soon as the Blue Anchor opens its doors the bar is full of men.

‘Ran out into the garden,’ Tibbles is saying, ‘couldn’t remember whether to run out or stay inside.’ And he looks around, nervous, as if he’s still not sure.

‘It came by that close,’ Father brings up the drinks, ‘that I put my head out of the window and I shook my stick at it.’

I sit in the corner and pretend that I have work. I use the last pages of my schoolbook to draw a picture of the airship, its bloated body and small propellered tail, the little cabin of its control room like a row of teeth.

‘I’d have struck it too,’ Father goes on, ‘but the wife said: think of the girl, ailing in her bed. We don’t want that great beast dropping its bombs on us.’ He takes a gulp of his own pint. Fred Snowling stands at the bar. One of the bombs just missed his cottage. And this morning the whole village trooped out to see the crater that it made in his front garden, big enough for his wife and two small daughters to roll into from their beds.

‘If I’d been there . . .’ Father has started up again. And Mother looks across at me and her lip twitches in the faintest of smiles. I smile back, and when her mouth begins to quiver, she turns and she goes out to the kitchen.

Mary arrives that afternoon. The first bomb fell on Henham Hall. It crashed through the conservatory, and the men, whose nerves are thin as straw, are so shaken she can only stay away for a few hours. But all the same she uses her time well. She helps Mother wash and change Ann, combing out her hair and plaiting it. A three-plait, she uses, like the simplest of George Allard’s twines, and she winds a ribbon through its fastened ends. She listens, more than once, to Father’s story of the stick, which has come now within an inch of knocking the Zeppelin from the sky, and when his back is turned, she puts her arms round Mother and their shoulders shake.

‘Don’t go,’ I hold tight to her arm.

‘I must,’ she says, and I follow her to where her bicycle is parked by the wall.

‘I’ll come when I can,’ she tells me. ‘Look after them for me.’ She wobbles as she cycles away and it is only when she turns to wave that I see the tired shadows that have gathered on her face.

There is a new poster outside Mrs Lusher’s shop.

WARNING – Daylight Air Raids

In order to provide, as far as possible, for the safety of the inhabitants, it has been decided that on information being received of the approach of Hostile Aircraft during the day, if time permits,

The Church Bells shall be ‘jangled’ for a short time, as a warning to any of the public who may be out of doors to at once seek safety in the nearest house, and on no account to remain in the street.

When the danger is past, one Bell will be tolled as a notice that normal conditions may be resumed.

The above warning will be in force from half an hour before sunrise to half an hour after sunset, and it is displayed to impress upon the inhabitants the necessity for strict compliance with these regulations.

As well as the promise of bells jangling through the day, at night minesweepers trawl the bay, and blackout police patrol the streets, searching for a chink of light. At Southwold, the constable climbs up to the roof of St Edmund’s church tower and sits there till morning to survey the town. If he sees a light, he sends a message down and his men march round to the offending building, and the inhabitants, whether they be soldiers or civilians, are fined.

There is no constable on the roof of our church tower, but even so, Mother and I pin sheets of black paper up against the windows of the inn, and she hangs a curtain made from sacking just inside the door. It is there to seal in light, and customers too it seems, for more than once I see a man tangled up in hessian as he grapples his way out.

At night I lie in blackness and listen to the Zeppelins flying over, straining my ears for the high whine of the bombs about to fall. I’m ready to leap from my bed and drag Ann with me to the cellar. I’ll prise up the trapdoor and step down those dank and mossy steps, to a path long since silted up. We’ll be safe there. Ann, a sleeping princess in my arms. But the planes fly on to London and for the moment we are saved.

‘Ann,’ I whisper. ‘Wake up, why don’t you?’ But she is in the good room, dreaming, white as her sheet, and it is only myself I jolt out of sleep.

There’s been a burst of rain, and the ground is broken up with flowers. Bluebells, and daffodils, all come at the same time, and a sprouting of forget-me-nots. There is a cherry tree drenched with blossom leaning out over the corner of the lane, and I am tempted to reach up and snap a branch off for the grave. But I hesitate. Mother has taught me that every blossom bears the promise of fruit, and when I come to the churchyard I find that she has already filled our pot. A clump of wild raspberry, pink and green, its smell as sour as piss. I lean down to breathe it in, because there’s sweetness in there too, and as I do I hear the chattering and squawking of my birds. There’s a newborn William, with his beak open, head out over the nest, and beside him the next William, looking at the sky. James, his feathers downy brown, his eyes fast blinking, makes a high peeping squeak, and as I strain for Thomas I see the parents, sleek and yellow-beaked, swoop in with a haul of worms. The volume rises, a flurry of flapping wings, and soon they are away again and the chicks are left alone.

Mac has every flower to choose from – wild garlic, bluebells, narcissi and fritillaries – but when I walk past his shed I see he has three sticks of hazel in a jar. ‘I could find you something?’ I offer. I’m thinking I could snap off a branch of sloe, no one would miss that, there’s a bush of it up by Keepers Cottage. But he doesn’t seem to have heard me, and only leans closer, squinting at the yellow fluff of the lamb’s-tails, and the tight green buds still waiting to unfurl.

Mrs Mac is inside. She’s making a sketch across a wide brown sheet of paper. There’s a woman at its centre, and on each side, with strings of flowers between them, are girls, their bodies swirled in cloaks. ‘Where are the roses?’ I’ve learnt to look for a Glasgow rose in everything she does. But Mrs Mac tells me that this is the May Queen and her flowers are those of spring. It is a sketch for a gesso panel she’d like to make, if she has the strength, and as I watch she mixes an auburn mess of paint and dipping in her brush fills in the May Queen’s hair.

‘But I’d need to gather the ingredients,’ she is talking mostly to herself. ‘Plaster of Paris, rabbit-skin glue, of course, and I’ll need some string, tin inlay, and glass beads.’ She carries on scattering small dots of flowers at the women’s feet.