Sacred Country (3 page)

Miss McRae looked like a person made of bark.

Her back was as straight and as thin as a comb. Her nose was fierce. Her long hands were hard and freckled.

Every child in that school was afraid of Miss McRae when they first saw her. They thought, if they went near her, they’d be scratched. But when she spoke, her Scottish voice brought a feeling of peace into the room and everyone was quiet. She began every day with a story of something she’d done when she was a girl, as if she knew she looked to us like a person who had never been a child. The first words I heard her say were: ‘When I was a lass, I lived in a lighthouse.’ And after that I liked Miss McRae and began to tell her some of the things I refused to tell my father.

That summer, sometime after the Beautiful Baby Contest, Miss McRae said to us: ‘Now, class, on Monday, I want you each to bring something to school. I want you to bring in something that is important or precious to you, or just something pretty that you like. And then I want you to tell me and the other children
why
you like it or why it is precious to you. It can be anything you like. No one need be afraid of looking silly. All you have to remember is to be able to say why you’ve chosen it.’

On the way home from school, I began to think about what I would take as my precious thing. When I’d been born, my mother had given me a silver chain with a silver and glass locket on it. Inside the locket was a piece of Grandmother Livia’s hair and my mother had said recently that I should treasure this locket for always and that, if I ever wore it, I should touch it every ten minutes to make certain it was still round my neck. I used to look at it sometimes. It made me wonder what Grandma Livia had been wearing round her neck when she got into the glider. I thought it was the kind of thing Miss McRae would like and I could hear her say approvingly: ‘What a pretty wee thing, Mary.’ But it wasn’t really precious to me. And if a thing isn’t precious to you then it isn’t and that’s it; it won’t become precious suddenly between Friday and Monday.

When I got home from school, I looked around my room. I thought I might find something precious I’d forgotten about. But there was hardly anything in my room: just my bed, which had come out of a cottage hospital sale, and a table with a lamp on it and a huge old wardrobe, in which I kept my sweet tin and my spelling book and my boots. The tin had a picture of a Swiss
chalet on it. It contained at that time two ounces of sherbert lemons and three Macintoshes toffees. I got it out and put a sherbert lemon into my mouth. I thought the little burst of sherbert might wake me up to the preciousness of something, but it didn’t and then I had this thought: no one has ever told me where Grandma Livia was
going
in that glider. Was she just going to Ipswich or was she going to the Tyrrhenian Sea?

By Sunday evening, after looking in my mother’s sewing basket and in her button box and in all the crannies of the house where an important thing might have hidden itself and finding nothing, I decided that I couldn’t go to school the next day. I would walk a long way from our farm. I would find a hayfield coming to its second cropping and I would sit in it and think about my coming life as a boy. I would examine myself for signs. Or I might climb a tree and stay there out of reach of everyone and everything, including all the stones in the soil.

For my mid-day dinner, my mother made me pickle sandwiches and a thermos of lemon squash. In the winter, the thermos had tea in it and the taste of the tea lingered over into the summer and came into the lemon squash, tepid and strange.

At the bottom of our lane, instead of turning left towards Swaithey and school, I turned right and began to run. I kept running until I was beyond the fields that were ours and then I stopped under a signpost and sat down. It was very hot there, even in that early morning sun. I drank some of my lemon squash. And then after about five minutes I got up and began tearing back the way I had come. I had remembered my precious thing.

I was late for the class. I had had some trouble on the way with Irene, who said: ‘What are you thinking of, Mary Ward? Whatever are you like?’

‘Please, Irene,’ I begged. ‘
Please
.’

I was in Mr Harker’s house, where Irene worked. Mr Harker had turned his cellar into a factory where he made cricket bats. The smell of wood and oil came up into all the rooms. A painted sign on his gate said:
Harker’s Bats
.

‘It’d only be for half an hour,’ I pleaded.

‘No,’ said Irene. ‘Now run along to school.’

But I got her in the end: Pearl, my precious thing.

I carried her like a big vase with both my arms round her. Miss McRae took her glasses off and frowned and said: ‘Whatever in the world, Mary?’ Lots of children giggled. I opened my desk top and laid Pearl down in my desk with her head on my Arithmetic book. I closed my ears and my mind to everybody laughing.

Pearl gazed at me. She looked frightened. I don’t suppose she’d ever been in a desk before. I gave her a little wooden ruler to play with but she hit herself on the nose with it and began to cry.

‘My, my,’ I heard Miss McRae say, ‘this is very irregular, Mary. Will you tell me please what this baby is doing in my lesson?’

I had to pick Pearl up to stop her crying. The boy who sat next to me, Billy Bateman, was laughing so hard he asked to be excused. I looked over to his desk and saw that he’d brought in a stamp album, all mutilated and falling apart, as if it had belonged to Noah. When I’m a boy, I thought, I’ll be a more interesting one than him.

‘Mary?’ said Miss McRae.

I felt my heart jump about inside my aertex blouse. I felt thirsty and very peculiarly sad. I thought I might cry, which was a thing I never did, but sometimes you cry with your face and your mind isn’t in it, but somewhere else, watching you. It was like that. It was my face that felt sad.

The thing was, I didn’t know what to say about Pearl. I didn’t understand why she was important to me, except that I thought she was very beautiful and I still couldn’t see why she hadn’t won that contest.

I held her awkwardly. When Timmy was born, my mother had tried to show me how to hold a baby, but I’d refused to listen. I thought, I must say something before Pearl slips out of my arms.

‘Is this baby your precious thing, Mary?’ asked Miss McRae kindly.

I nodded.

‘I see, dear,’ she said, ‘well in that case, perhaps you will be able to tell the class why?’

Pearl, at that moment, let her head fall onto my shoulder, as if she wanted to go to sleep and start snoring. Her hand was still on my cheek, holding on to it. I said: ‘Her name’s Pearl. I was going to bring this locket with some of my grandmother’s hair in it.’

‘Yes, dear?’

‘But.’

‘Yes?’

‘It wasn’t precious.’

‘No?’

‘No. It wasn’t.’

‘But Pearl is?’

‘Yes.’

‘And I wonder if you can tell us why, Mary?’

‘Some things are.’

‘That’s quite true.’

‘But you can’t say it properly. Like my mother can’t. If you asked her to bring in a thing, she’d have maybe brought in her sewing machine.’

Miss McRae waited. After a bit, she understood that I couldn’t say anything more so she nodded gravely. My face was boiling red. I thought I might be going to explode and see my insides splatter out all over my desk and all over Billy Bateman’s stamp album. I asked if I could sit down and Miss McRae said yes, so I sat and watched the next child go up with her precious thing. It was my so-called friend, Judy Weaver. She’d brought an ugly little salmon-coloured doll, dressed as a fairy. I’d seen this doll standing on the window sill in her parents’ bathroom. It was a toilet-roll cover. You stuffed the doll’s thin legs down the cardboard tube and her gauzy skirt went over the paper, hiding it from view.

After that day of the Precious Things, I didn’t want Judy Weaver as a friend any more. I didn’t want any friends. None.

For four generations, the Loomis family had lived in Swaithey. Their shop, Arthur Loomis & Son, Family Butchers, had opened in 1861. A faded photograph of old Arthur, wearing a long apron and holding a tray of dressed game, now hung in the shop window above the pork joints and the skinned rabbits and the bowls of tripe. Smiling and plump, with a thick moustache, he looked like a man fattening himself up for eternity. All the generations of sons who followed him and kept the business thriving had heard Arthur Loomis speak to them in their sleep. It was as if every one of them had got to know him in time. Ernie Loomis, the present proprietor, born twelve years after Arthur had died, could describe his voice. ‘Nice and slow,’ he said it was, ‘and nice and gentle.’

Behind the shop was the cold room and behind this, hidden from sight by a high wall, was the slaughtering yard. The animals were strung up by their hind legs on a pulley. Their blood flowed into a gully and from there into a drain which debouched into a soakaway under the very field the heifers grazed in summer.

In one corner of this field lived Ernie Loomis’s brother, Pete. His home was a converted trolley bus, its roof pitched and thatched. Between Pete’s living room and his cramped kitchen was a sign which read:
Push button once to stop bus
. Nobody much except the family knew Pete Loomis. He worked in the slaughtering yard or in the fields, never in the shop. The iris of his left eye wandered, so that he could seldom look square at a person, yet at the moment of a slaughter his eyes aligned themselves and he slit with precision. He had no wife or child. He’d spent some time in the American South. There were rumours of a long-ago crime. In the village drapers, where he bought his underwear, the Misses Cunningham referred to him as ‘a most uncustomary man’.

Yet he was a boon to Ernie. Ernie had never liked the yard. His art was in dead meat. The gentry of East Suffolk knew him
by name, as he knew them. His voice, like his ancestor’s, was quiet, his fingers nimble. He was diligent, ordered and clean. Every morning, he got up at five and brought his wife, Grace, a cup of tea and kissed her forehead, moist from her night. By six he was at his block and at eight the shutters of the shop went up. All day long, while Ernie passed between block and counter, Grace sat in a little booth with her cash register and her book of accounts. When there was no one in the shop, Ernie would talk to her through the glass.

Ernie and Grace had one child, Walter. At sixteen, he resembled Pete more than Ernie. He had a dreamy look. His hair was thick and black, like Pete’s. His cheeks had a high colour. His spelling was poor and his handwriting laboured. As a child, he’d grown much too fast and the pain of this growing had been felt in every one of his bones. But now it had stopped. He hoped there wouldn’t be another spurt of it. He let his limbs relax and get ready for life.

He noticed then, when he could listen to what was outside his pain, that his singing voice was rather fine – so peculiarly fine he felt it couldn’t possibly belong to him. He sang as he worked, sometimes helping his parents in the shop, but more often mucking out the pig sties and feeding the hens or working with Pete in the yard. He didn’t know the words to many songs, only the things he’d grown up with: old soupy ballads such as ‘The Minstrel Boy’ and ‘Barbara Allen’ and some of the wartime favourites his mother loved so, ‘Ida, Sweet as Apple Cider’, ‘Love is the Sweetest Thing’, ‘When They Sound the Last All-Clear’.

His Uncle Pete taught him to play a banjo. The two of them would sit in Pete’s bus, strumming simple chords. And then Walter would sing and they’d both incline their heads towards the
Push button once
sign, as if the song might be coming from there. Sometimes, it got dark on their banjo sessions, and cold, and the grazing heifers would cluster round the bus, flanks tightly packed, drawn to the body of the old trolley by the blueish light of the Tilley lamp and by the melody.

Devotion to things came easily to Walter. Once devoted, he
would not be turned aside. In despair about his hopeless schoolwork and the pain of his growing, Ernie and Grace consoled themselves with this devotion of his. Every night before going to his room, he let his mother embrace him and his father give him a comradely pat on the shoulder. He told them he was proud that the name Loomis was known across half the country and that one day the shop would be his. Yet, privately, he had difficulty imagining this. He lacked his father’s skill with the knife and his mother’s head for sums. And he was happiest outside. ‘You and I,’ Pete said to him in the bus one evening, ‘we’re hillbillies, Walter.’ And Walter grinned, liking the sound of the word.

On a night of heavy summer rain, Pete got drunk on whisky. He lay on the floor of the bus with his head propped up by a chair. His wall eye meandered about, looking for a memory. He began to talk about Memphis. He said: ‘I was a gardener in Memphis in ’38. A church gardener.’

‘What’s a church gardener?’ asked Walter.

‘Gardener to a church. In this case, Baptist. With three lawns and two beds of annuals and a lot of roses. And what came out of that church was music.’

‘What kind of music?’

‘Gospel music. Lovely sound, boy. Used to send me trickles up and down me.’

He told Walter that he never would have left Memphis but for something that happened there. He said happiness was the main condition in Tennessee, despite the Depression and the bad times. Blacks were faithful there. Dogs were faithful. Even the seasons were faithful. Spring came in an afternoon. Winter tore in on an ice storm. ‘And the fall, Walter, well, that lets you lie in it an’ dream, and out of all the fall-dreaming comes the music.’

He made Walter get up and look for an old record among his collection of 78s in brown-paper sleeves that he kept in a wooden chest with an eiderdown and some mole traps. ‘Jimmie Rodgers!’ Pete announced. ‘The Singing Brakeman, The Blue Yodeller! You put that on the grammy and have a listen …’

Walter found the record. He got out Pete’s box gramophone and wound it up. The way the heavy, silvery needle arm was moulded to twist over so easily pleased him. He sat down and waited for the scratching of the needle to become song.