‘This is one of our chickens, isn’t it?’ Maurice said.
Ursula liked the chickens, liked the warm straw and featheriness of the henhouse, liked reaching under the solid warm bodies to find an even warmer egg.
‘It’s Henrietta, isn’t it?’ Maurice persisted. ‘She was old. Ready for the pot, Mrs Glover said.’
Ursula inspected her plate. She was particularly fond of Henrietta. The tough white slice of meat gave no clues.
‘Henrietta?’ Pamela squeaked in alarm.
‘Did you kill her?’ Maurice asked Sylvie eagerly. ‘Was it very bloody?’
They had already lost several chickens to the foxes. Sylvie said she was surprised at how stupid chickens were. No more stupid than people, Mrs Glover said. The foxes had taken Pamela’s baby rabbit too, last summer. George Glover had rescued two and Pamela had insisted on making a nest for hers out in the garden but Ursula had rebelled and brought her little rabbit inside and placed it in the dolls’ house where it knocked everything over and left droppings like tiny liquorice balls. When Bridget discovered it she removed it to an outhouse and it was never seen again.
For pudding they had jam roly-poly and custard, the jam from the summer’s raspberries. The summer was a dream now, Sylvie said.
‘Dead baby,’ Maurice said, in that horribly offhand manner that boarding school had only served to foster. He shovelled pudding into his mouth and said, ‘That’s what we call jam roly-poly at school.’
‘Manners, Maurice,’ Sylvie warned. ‘And please, don’t be so vile.’
‘Dead baby?’ Ursula said, putting her spoon down and gazing in horror at the dish in front of her.
‘The Germans eat them,’ Pamela said gloomily.
‘Puddings?’ Ursula puzzled. Didn’t everyone eat puddings, even the enemy?
‘No, babies,’ Pamela said. ‘But only Belgian ones.’
Sylvie looked at the roly-poly, the round, red seam of jam like blood, and shivered. This morning she had watched Mrs Glover snapping poor old Henrietta’s neck backwards over a broom handle, the bird dispatched with the indifference of a state executioner. Needs must, I suppose, Sylvie thought. ‘We’re at war,’ Mrs Glover said, ‘it’s not the time to be squeamish.’
Pamela would not let the subject rest. ‘Was it, Mummy?’ she insisted quietly. ‘Was it Henrietta?’
‘No, darling,’ Sylvie said. ‘On my word of honour, that was not Henrietta.’
An urgent rapping at the back door prevented further discussion. They all sat still, staring at each other, as if they had been caught in the middle of a crime. Ursula didn’t really know why. ‘Don’t let it be bad news,’ Sylvie said. It was. Seconds later there was a terrible scream from the kitchen. Sam Wellington, the old boot, was dead.
‘This terrible war,’ Sylvie murmured.
Pamela gave Ursula the remains of one of her dun-coloured balls of four-ply lambswool and Ursula promised that Queen Solange would be delivered of a little mat for Pamela’s water glass in gratitude for her rescue.
When they went to bed that night they placed the crinoline lady and Queen Solange side by side on the bedside cabinet, valiant survivors of an encounter with the enemy.
Armistice
June 1918
TEDDY’S BIRTHDAY. BORN beneath the sign of the crab. An enigmatic sign, Sylvie said, even though she thought such things were ‘bunkum’. ‘For you are four,’ Bridget said, which was perhaps a kind of joke.
Sylvie and Mrs Glover were preparing a little tea-party, ‘a surprise’. Sylvie liked all her children, Maurice not so much perhaps, but she doted entirely on Teddy.
Teddy didn’t even know it was his birthday as for days now they had been under strict instructions not to mention it. Ursula couldn’t believe how difficult it was to keep a secret. Sylvie was an adept. She told them to take ‘the birthday boy’ out while she got things ready. Pamela complained that she had never had a surprise party and Sylvie said, ‘Of course you have, you just don’t remember.’ Was this true? Pamela frowned at the impossibility of knowing. Ursula had no idea whether or not she had ever had a surprise party or even a party that wasn’t a surprise. The past was a jumble in her mind, not the straight line that it was for Pamela.
Bridget said, ‘Come on, we’ll all go for a walk,’ and Sylvie said, ‘Yes, take some jam to Mrs Dodds, why don’t you?’ Sylvie, sleeves rolled up, hair scarved, had spent all day yesterday helping Mrs Glover make jam, boiling up copper pans of raspberries from the garden with the sugar that they had been hoarding from their ration. ‘Like working in a munitions factory,’ Sylvie said, as she funnelled the boiling jam into one glass jar after another. ‘Hardly,’ Mrs Glover muttered to herself.
The garden had produced a bumper crop, Sylvie had read books on how to cultivate fruit and declared that she was quite the gardener now. Mrs Glover said darkly that berries were easy, wait until she tried her hand at cauliflowers. For the heavy work in the garden Sylvie employed Clarence Dodds, once a pal of Sam Wellington’s, the old boot. Before the war Clarence had been an under-gardener at the Hall. He had been invalided out of the army and now wore a tin mask on half of his face and said he wanted to work in a grocer’s shop. Ursula first came across him when he was preparing a bed for carrots and she gave an impolite little scream when he turned round and she saw his face for the first time. The mask had one wide-open eye painted blue to match the real one. ‘Enough to frighten the horses, isn’t it?’ he said and smiled. She wished he hadn’t because his mouth wasn’t covered by the mask. His lips were puckered and strange as if they were an afterthought, stitched on after he was born.
‘One of the lucky ones,’ he said to her. ‘Artillery fire, it’s the devil.’ It didn’t look very lucky to Ursula.
The carrots had barely sprigged their feathery tops above ground when Bridget started walking out with Clarence. By the time Sylvie was grubbing up the first of the King Edwards, Bridget and Clarence were engaged and, as Clarence couldn’t afford a ring, Sylvie gave Bridget a gypsy ring that she said she’d ‘had for ever’ and never wore. ‘It’s just a trinket really,’ she said, ‘it’s not worth much,’ although Hugh had bought it for her in New Bond Street after Pamela was born and had not stinted on the cost.
Sam Wellington’s photograph was banished to an old wooden crate in the shed. ‘I can’t keep it,’ Bridget said fretfully to Mrs Glover, ‘but I can hardly throw it away, can I now?’
‘You could bury it,’ Mrs Glover suggested but the idea gave Bridget the shivers. ‘Like black magic.’
They set off for Mrs Dodds’s house, laden with jam, as well as a magnificent bouquet of maroon sweet peas that Sylvie was very proud of having grown. ‘The variety is “Senator”, in case Mrs Dodds is interested,’ she told Bridget.
‘She won’t be,’ Bridget said.
Maurice wasn’t with them, of course. He had set off on his bicycle after breakfast, a picnic lunch in his knapsack, and had disappeared for the day with his friends. Ursula and Pamela took very little interest in Maurice’s life and he took none whatsoever in theirs. Teddy was a quite different kind of brother, loyal and affectionate as a dog and petted accordingly.
Clarence’s mother was still employed at the Hall in ‘a semi-feudal capacity’, according to Sylvie, and had a cottage on the estate, a cramped, ancient thing that smelt of stale water and old plaster. Distemper on the damp ceiling ballooned like loose skin. Bosun had died of distemper the previous year and was buried beneath a Bourbon rose that Sylvie had ordered especially to mark his grave. ‘It’s called “Louise Odier”,’ she said. ‘If you’re interested.’ They had another dog now, a wriggly black lurcher puppy called Trixie who might as well have been called Trouble because Sylvie was always laughing and saying, ‘Uh-oh, here comes trouble.’ Pamela had seen Mrs Glover giving Trixie a well-aimed kick with her big-booted foot and Sylvie had ‘to have a word’. Bridget wouldn’t let Trixie come to Mrs Dodds’s house, she said she would never hear the end of it. ‘She doesn’t believe in dogs,’ Bridget said.