A desert island is a more suitable place for laughter though than a railway carriage in England. Miss Ranskill realised this truth, as she was made self-conscious by the alarmed gaze of the woman opposite. The sailor found her more interesting than the meadows he had been watching. He turned to look at her, and his sudden movement awakened the airman, who blinked amazedly.
A three-year-old child, on its mother’s lap, pointed a sticky finger and demanded, ‘Do it again!’ The elderly civilian at her side coughed rather peevishly.
Some explanation seemed necessary. Since Miss Ranskill found it impossible to give one, and equally impossible to keep silence throughout such concern, she compromised by saying, ‘I do apologise!’ in a voice that was very much louder than she had meant it to be.
Instantly all the eyes, except those belonging to the small child, were averted from her. Had she been naked, she could not have been treated with such severe seemliness.
‘Do it again!’ repeated the child.
‘’Ush!’ said the mother. ‘Give over looking at the lady,’ and she dumped the child round on her lap until it shared the view through the carriage window with its embarrassed elders.
And now Miss Ranskill was very much alone, reproved and excommunicate from the society of her fellow-beings. She sought consolation by looking at the identity card, which did not do much to reassure her, though it should have assured any official that Ranskill Nona M/FURL/2388/2 was a British citizen and had a right to existence.
The child turned round to glance at her but was again twisted into position by its mother.
‘Miaou!’ said the little cat from the basket on the rack, ‘Miaou! Miaou!’
Once more the occupants of the carriage stirred to look at Miss Ranskill. Some peeped furtively, some glanced once and then away.
‘Do it again!’ cried the child.
‘Miaou! Miaou!’ repeated the cat obligingly.
The extremely perturbed face of the child’s mother suggested that she thought it bad manners to practise ventriloquism in a train.
Miss Ranskill sighed, as she stood up and took the basket from the rack.
From the moment she opened the lid she stopped being an alien. She and the little cat and the kittens became the most popular travellers.
‘Did you ever!’ said the mother of the baby. ‘What little dears!’
The sailor raised the chin of the black kitten with a forefinger until the milky eyes blinked at him.
‘We’d one the spit of this in the ship,’ he said. ‘It fell overboard off Gib – a bad day’s work that was. Might have been this little chap’s twin.’
The airman plucked the tortoiseshell from Miss Ranskill’s lap and laid it in the palm of his hand.
The woman opposite became confidential.
‘I’d a lovely cat at home, orange with a great white ruff,’ she traced the tawny stripes of the smallest kitten with a scarlet fingernail. ‘I had to give him away when I went into digs and started office work. Then I found my landlady would have looked after him for me, and I’ve been kicking myself ever since.’
‘Kitty! Kitty!’ shrilled the child.
‘The very spit of this one,’ repeated the sailor. ‘I wouldn’t mind being a ship’s cat myself. Want to come to sea, do you?’
He addressed the black kitten and Miss Ranskill answered for it.
‘Would you like to have it? If you would I could send it to you as soon as it can leave its mother, if you give me your address. It might be lucky.’
‘What about making a few flights over Germany, eh?’
The airman was questioning the tortoiseshell but the child’s mother reproved him.
‘All very well, but suppose you was shot down, what happens to the kitten then?’
‘I hadn’t thought of that,’ replied the airman humbly.
The man by Miss Ranskill’s side spoke for the first time.
‘We are a truly remarkable people!’ he declared. ‘I have always maintained that if the Speaker kept a supply of puppies to be produced in the House at appropriate moments, the most heated debates would end amicably. In fact, if the Germans were dog-lovers there need have been no war. An International Kennel Club could have done much more than any League of Nations. You, Madam, who can anticipate so glibly the tragedy of a kitten’s death and ignore what to you is, presumably, the minor accident of the loss of a man’s life, prove my point.’
And now, the man in the waterproof took Miss Ranskill’s place as outcast.
The child’s mother sucked her teeth ostentatiously, and muttered, ‘Well, I mean to say, poor dumb animals!’ and turned her offspring’s back on the brutal speaker.
‘Poor little beggar,’ said the airman, as he stroked the kitten under its golden chin.
‘If you was wanting a home for the black one,’ suggested the sailor.
In five minutes, Miss Ranskill had found homes for all the kittens. Three slips of paper, bearing addresses to which they might be sent as soon as they could leave their mother, joined the identity card and ration books in her handbag. Once more she was a person of some consequence, a giver of gifts with a place in society.
The man by her side craned a vulture neck to peer at the huddle of kittens in her lap.
‘A remarkable people,’ he repeated. ‘You, Madam, have probably drunk milkless tea for the last few years and sacrificed your butter ration for the sake of a cat’s paws. You would think it generosity to take meat from the mouth of a child and give it to your lap-dog.’
‘For the last few years,’ Miss Ranskill told him, ‘I have not tasted milk or tea or butter. I’ve robbed gulls’ nests and snatched at the fish they dropped from their mouths whenever they were fools enough to open them.’
And now she was in isolation again, outcast with the man who had no truck with kittens. The females in the carriage looked uncomfortable, the males, except her partner, incredulous.
‘Sounds like a desert island,’ he muttered.
‘It was a desert island.’
Miss Ranskill turned her face to the window but she did not see the rushing landscapes. She was wondering if she would ever be able to remember that her truth was shocking and evidently not to be borne by a people who, though they had suffered air-raids and mutilations, the destruction of their homes and the death of their kin, yet could not bear to hear oddly-timed laughter or statements of facts beyond their immediate knowledge.
Presently the train had swept past the scarred outskirts of Bath and the crowded station, where men and women in every kind of uniform jostled each other like sheep or stood forlornly by kit-bags.
Then there were more ravaged buildings and then little housebound roads thrust themselves out towards the country. At last there were only farms and grey villages with the green of Somerset in between. The lanes, like all lanes seen from train windows, led to nowhere in particular. The houses only existed as pictures for the benefit of travellers. One might as soon live in one of them as inhabit a cottage in a water-colour sketch. The villages were as fantastic as all railway villages are, the children who waved from the sidings had no existence at all, and it was impossible to think of anyone stepping on to one of the wayside platforms in order to go home. Yet there was a difference – there was something lacking, and for a long time Miss Ranskill wondered what it could be.
When, at last, she remembered, she was rather shocked. It was all very well to play the railway game with villages and stations, but they were going a little too far when they began to play back. It was as baffling as though a baby whom you had addressed as ‘there’s a pretty lamb then’ had suddenly leaped on all fours and followed its mother, the sheep.