‘I haven’t anything in the world but what I stand up in – not a single thing.’
She was wearing a brown tweed skirt and a white sweater. Her bare toes showed through the strapping of her childish sandals. Her straight brown hair had a nursery look.
‘You’re luckier than I am,’ said her mother. ‘You’ve all your London things safe in Town.’
‘But I haven’t. I brought them all back.’
‘Whatever for?’
The golden-brown eyes flickered and then looked wary.
‘Oh! just to mend and – and sort over.’
‘If only you’d been in a uniformed job everything would have been easy,’ announced Marjorie. ‘You’d only have had to ask for a new issue of everything.’
‘Yes, and now I haven’t got a rag.’
‘You look–’ began Rex, and then checked by his mother’s stare, supplemented ‘all right’ for the word in his mind. ‘You look quite all right.’
‘But not for always.’
The girl stood in her wedding garments, a Cinderella of a bride.
‘It seems,’ she said, ‘it seems so funny to be The Enemy. Fancy my things being bombed.’
Miss Ranskill had seen that look before in the eyes of a very young rabbit early one morning. It had stopped nibbling clover, raised the dewy quivering nose that could catch a hint of menace more surely than the pink transparent ears. The rabbit’s eyes had spoken. ‘Then there’s something more in my world than clover and dew and mother and all the rest of us. Something bad.’ Then it had terrified itself to a flurry and its white scut had flashed out signals of reproach all the way from the clover-patch to the burrow.
‘Fancy my things being bombed. Somehow I never–’
‘Come on, and let’s dig out blankets,’ said Marjorie, deaf to the words behind the words – ‘Fancy my man being vulnerable!’
CHAPTER TWELVE
Two of the kittens were beginning to open their eyes, but the third, a tortoiseshell, maintained blind indifference to the light that gave shape to the wickerwork around it. In a day or two now, its sisters would discover, by diffident paw-pats, that shapes can be felt, that looming straws can become enchanting playthings, and reward by strokings more pleasurable than the licking of a mother’s tongue. The tortoiseshell kitten was in no hurry, the warmth of its mother delighted it; that was enough for the time.
Miss Ranskill, in her corner of the third-class carriage, felt in much the same mood. Two newspapers lay unopened on the lap of her new grey skirt. Presently she would try to understand their contents, but for the moment it was enough to watch the landscape flicking past, to see the flourishing of the may-flowered hedges and be dazzled by the fields of the cloth of gold.
But what went ye out for to see? But what went ye out for to see?
The engine chugged out the tune insistently and a loose button on the sleeve of the woman opposite joggled on its thread in rhythm. But what went ye out for to see? But what went ye out for to see?
Green and gold willows edged a stream. But what went ye out for to see? A reed shaken with the wind?
A re-eed shaken with the wi-ind, a re-eed shaken with the wi-ind. The chant of the engine was so clear to Miss Ranskill that she felt the other occupants of the carriage must interpret it too.
Ten days ago she had shuffled away the broken glass below Marjorie’s spare room window, had looked through the empty frames to see Lucy Brown running hatless and bare-legged down the path on her way to a wedding. Before that, the girl had talked to her for a few minutes.
‘Rex says you know about us. Nobody else must till afterwards. Rex is being awfully sweet about it. He says he likes me better in these things. Mummy would be horrified. She’d always planned a white wedding and never in May either. But you can’t wait for June in war-time when – when we may only have one week of May ever – for all our lives.’ The goldeny eyes had shown fear for a second time. ‘Rex doesn’t think about what – what might happen. I don’t think he’s ever thought he mightn’t be lucky. Boys don’t when they’re that age: it’s only the women who know. So we laugh a lot and I don’t think he ever guesses.’
A re-eed shaken with the wi-ind, chugged the engine, But what went ye out for to see?
Now the carriage window framed a seascape and then a tangle of barbed wire made Teignmouth beach ugly. The red rocks of Dawlish had kept their shape and the waves were scudding inland. Miss Ranskill remembered journeys taken to the West Country as a child, her first sight of the sea and the thought that the waves were hurrying inland to cool the hot tired wheels of the train so that it could run faster to the land of buckets and spades, sandy buns, jelly-fish and seaside lodgings.
The label on the kittens’ basket flapped in the salty breeze. There had been trouble about the kittens. The clank of a bucket-handle on the morning after the air-raid had reminded Miss Ranskill of a promise she had made in the cellar.
‘Oh! well,’ Marjorie had looked cross and tired. ‘Oh, well, I suppose if you promised Cecil, we’ll have to keep one. I suppose we shall get a lot of mice from the bombed houses. All the same–’
‘Can I draown the kittens?’ the request came from Cecil, ‘lemme draown them!’
‘There you see, he doesn’t want a kitten at all. No, Cecil, nice little boys don’t drown kittens. Your mother can do it properly. You’d better do it now, Mrs Bostock, but I suppose you’d better keep one or the cat will be ill.’
‘But, Marjorie, I didn’t promise Cecil.’
‘I thought you said you did.’
‘I promised,’ and here Miss Ranskill hesitated because it was quite impossible to say in the presence of Mrs Bostock, ‘I promised the cat.’
She did not feel sure that, even to one with as high a sense of honour as Marjorie, a promise made to a cat would count. Anyway, it would sound idiotic, and was unreasonable. She would never be able to explain the instinct that had forced her to guarantee cathood for three blind kittens.
‘Oh! well, I suppose Rex wants them for mascots or something. If you promised him, we’d better keep them. They’ll have to stay where they are though. You know we’ve got to go to a hotel for at least a fortnight while the windows and things are repaired.’
Later, feeling guilty because she was using part of the money lent by Marjorie, Miss Ranskill had bought a basket, big enough for the cat and her unweaned kittens.
The days that had wrought such a change in them had altered Miss Ranskill too, and brought her knowledge.
She was now recognised as a citizen and had an identity card to prove her right to exist. She had three ration books, one for clothes, one for food, and a third that enabled her to buy three-quarters of a pound of sweets each month.
But what went ye out for to see? A reed shaken with the wind or three ration books?
She had an identity disc too – a parting present from Marjorie, who had delivered a speech when she gave it.
‘You won’t think me morbid or anything, will you, old thing? But honestly it’s the most practical present I could think of. If you should cop it in a blitz, it would save an awful lot of fag to the people who’d dig you out. I mean, nowadays when time’s so precious one really oughtn’t to go on giving bother after one’s dead. Besides, if there should be an invasion, and I honestly hope, I mean, I think there may be one, it might save you being shovelled into a Hun grave. Because, after all, there’d be some women among the invaders, nurses and things. Besides, there’d probably only be odd bits of you left and a few scraps of clothes. Honestly, I can’t think of anything more ghastly than being buried with Huns – enough to make you turn in your grave, if you’d anything left to turn, I mean. And, I say, old thing, I’ve had the school motto engraved on the back of the identity disc to make a sort of link between us.’