We Must Be Brave

‘Suky. How do you feel, when the screen needs mending?’

She stared.

‘I’m writing to the Ministry. Would you say it sapped your morale?’

‘Oh. Yes.’ She grinned. The most unsappable woman one could hope to meet. ‘And that of my workforce.’

… and that of her workforce. ‘Thanks. Why isn’t Mr Parr doing the sluice?’

Suky raised her shoulders. In someone less delicate it would be a shrug. ‘I don’t know. He asked me. Oh – I saw you with the little girl. Yesterday on my day off. You were running for the bus. I was on it, but I couldn’t make that old sourpuss of a driver stop. Oh, I felt for you.’ She was smiling down at me, warmth in her bright blue eyes.

‘Oh, yes. We missed it by a mile. Children.’ I shook my head as if knowingly. Where was Selwyn?

‘I expect you’ll be glad to get her settled,’ Suky said. ‘The Henstrows are respectable people, very clean. Mrs Henstrow I’ve always found very … practical.’

I let my fingers drop onto the keyboard. A handful of keys rose into the air, the limbs of a struggling metal insect.

‘The Henstrows?’

‘That farm up at Speeds Hill, yes. You sound like you’re getting a throat, Mrs Parr. Be sure and tie your scarf high. Peter told me last night. Peter Flack, Constable Flack, you know he’s my half-brother. Oh, Mrs Parr, are you off, then?’

I fled out, coat unbuttoned. The cold air in my throat like pewter. I reached the house, skating on the damp flagstones of the path. I went into the hall. ‘Selwyn!’

His voice came, muffled, from our bedroom. I ran upstairs.

He was sitting on the floor with Pamela. Between them was a wavering rank of toy soldiers and a cushion.

‘The Henstrows,’ I said. ‘Suky told me.’

‘Yes.’ He levered himself to his feet, tugging the bags out of the knees of his trousers. ‘I arranged it yesterday. We got them in the nick of time. They were about to take a boy from Portsmouth. I’ve just been explaining it all to Pamela. I thought it was important that we had a proper talk about it as soon as she woke up.’

Pamela toured a toy soldier over the plumped cushion. ‘I’m going to be with a family, you know, Ellen.’ She spoke without turning her head, her face a small, pale, full moon in the wardrobe mirror.

‘You telephoned.’ I looked at Selwyn. ‘Yesterday afternoon, while we were out.’

I sank down onto the bed. He came to sit beside me, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees. His wrists were thin, the veins stark, his cuffs frayed. His large, spare hands were beautiful. ‘Darling—’

‘Why didn’t you tell me yesterday?’

‘I should have. I know.’

In the mirror I saw Pamela’s face close. It was almost nothing, a barely perceptible tightening of the corners of her mouth. Many people wouldn’t have noticed, but I knew her face already.

Selwyn spoke. ‘We were thinking about packing, Pamela and I.’

I got up and left the room. On the landing I paused. In front of me was a picture, a Victorian oil of a family of bucolics disporting themselves in a tree-shrouded lane entirely free of mud and animal dung. Young and old alike were rosy-cheeked, clad in clean, white smocks. I felt a blunt stab of pain, as if from a bone needle.

Selwyn followed me out, laid a hand on my shoulder, withdrew it again when I didn’t turn round. ‘Selwyn, did you know I hate this picture beyond measure?’

He gave a small puff of soundless laughter, agonized. ‘I love you so much.’

‘What?’ The word broke out of me in a stunned gasp. ‘What’s that got to do with anything?’

Pamela opened the door. ‘Why are you whooshing?’ she asked.

‘Pamela,’ I said, ‘why don’t you make a battlefield? You can show the boys when you’ve finished.’

We went downstairs. The boys were chattering in the kitchen, and Elizabeth was hanging the children’s smalls on a clothes-horse in front of the sitting-room fire. We slipped outside and sat on a bench in the garden. For a minute, sitting straight-backed in the sharp frost and the low morning sun, I felt that we were both young, with everything before us. A great shiver convulsed me.

He began speaking immediately. ‘I can’t have a child in this house. It’s too dangerous.’

I gaped. ‘What are you talking about? The house is full of children. They’re here because it’s safe.’

‘It won’t be, in an invasion.’

‘My God.’ The nerves leaped in my belly. ‘Have you heard something? Has there been a warning?’ I clutched his arm. ‘Selwyn—’

‘No. Nothing like that. I’m simply looking to the future. If they invade, the children will all have to be moved.’ He squinted up at the mill. ‘You know our building’s strategic. I told you, Ellen. William Kennet and his party will be up there tomorrow with their chisels.’

‘He didn’t say anything about that when I saw him.’

‘Discretion is the watchword. He probably didn’t know then.’

Above me the mill rose quiet in the sunlight. Such a fine place it was, well-founded and built for peace, the only damage two centuries of weathering by frost and sun. I could not picture it pierced by gunsights, even less wreathed in smoke. The idea was sickening. I wrapped my arms around my body. If no one would comfort me, I would do it myself. ‘Why just Pamela?’ I spoke mutinously. ‘Why aren’t the boys going?’

‘Their families will take them when the moment comes.’

‘If it comes.’

‘If it comes. But with Pamela it’s different. Her life’s been shattered. We can’t risk her taking root here, and then having to be moved again. It wouldn’t be fair. Constable Flack suggested we find her a family, and that’s what I’ve done. On a farm, far from the roads, as safe as can be, for the duration of the war. That’s no more than our duty, in my view.’

The sun was lifting into the bare branches of the rowan tree. There was a rowan outside my house at the Absaloms, and an owl that used to perch in it. The tree and the sun were tainted now with a dreadful bitterness. If only Selwyn hadn’t driven down to fetch the grain. If only he hadn’t seen the city after the air raid.

‘I should have gone to Southampton,’ I said.

He laughed; it was an unpleasant sound. ‘Yes, you should,’ he said. ‘You’d have seen the children then, with tears running through the soot on their cheeks. It’ll be worse, of course, after the actual invasion.’ He turned to look at me. ‘You really should have seen France in the last war, Ellen. Children standing alone in shelled houses, too stunned to cry, surrounded by the bodies of their families.’ He nodded slowly. ‘Yes, France. You’d know, then, what could happen to Pamela.’

A long moment passed. Selwyn’s eyes were slitted against the early-morning light, his face worn, crumpled.

‘I don’t understand,’ I said in the end. ‘I thought you agreed with Colonel Daventry. He doesn’t think it’s remotely—’

‘Daventry’s making petrol bombs.’

The sun was rising higher into the tree. A branch had split it across.

‘People make a better job of things,’ I heard Selwyn say, ‘if they’re not utterly terrified. That’s what we find. So we encourage a certain superstition, in the Home Guard. That the more thorough our preparations, the less likely it is that they will be needed.’ He stood up slowly, pushing his hands against his knees. ‘Now. Pamela needs to get ready.’

She raised her arms obediently as I pulled the singlet over her head. I could believe that children were born out of the buds of giant flowers, little gods and goddesses, so perfect was her body. Those extraordinary, clear, peat-brook eyes, wide-set in a round face. This hair the colour of the darkest honey. Those neat, plump little toes. I wondered if Mrs Henstrow would look on her and marvel.

‘Can I come and take you for walks?’ The tears bathed my eyes.

Her eyebrows kinked. ‘Just me, will you take? Or all the Henstrows? There’s five, Mr Parr said so. A boy and a boy and a boy and a girl and a girl, and that last girl is ten. The boy at the top is a farmer, he’s so big. So he would be too busy to come, I expect.’

I buttoned her dress. Reached the broken top button. ‘Let me snip off this button and sew on a new one. Hold still.’ I opened my sewing drawer. My scissors lay beside Mrs Pickering’s slips of greaseproof paper and cotton.

‘I might stay with the Henstrows for ever, or Aunt Margie might come and get me after the end of the war. But we don’t know when that’ll be. Why are you sniffling? Do my button.’

If she was in South Africa I’d find her. I would find her on all points of the earth. ‘Say please.’

‘Do my button please. Please may you do my button.’

‘We don’t say please may you.’ I cut the button fragment off and tore out the broken threads.

‘Yes, we do. It’s polite.’

‘No, we only say, please may I.’ I licked the end of the thread and inserted it into the needle, holding my eyes wide so that the tiny, shining, oval hole should not blur. ‘We say please can you, or could you. Put your head forward.’

She bent her neck. I pushed her hair aside. Her nape was covered in fine, golden down. How could anyone refuse this glory? I kneeled behind her and put the needle’s point through the loop of a small pearl button.

As Pamela ate her porridge I took hold of her free hand and rubbed my thumb across her dimples of knuckles. The hand small enough still for the fingers to radiate, like a starfish. A crease at her wrist, the babyish plumpness. Her whole forearm I could take in my spread hand.

‘If Mummy comes here, will you tell her I’m at the Henstrows’ house?’ she said suddenly. ‘I do know she’s gone. But just in case.’

Blessed art thou.

‘Yes. Of course I will. Would you like some more?’

‘Is there any sugar?’

‘No.’

‘Then no more.’

Selwyn stood in the doorway in his hat and coat, his thin jaw cuddled by his scarf. ‘Hurry, Pamela, or the kitchen pig will come and snuffle you away.’

‘What kitchen pig?’

‘This one.’ He made an absurd snort, and she giggled like bubbles coming up through a stream, and for that astonishing glimpse of fatherliness, now that it was too late, I wanted to strike him.

The motor car coughed and struggled into life. ‘How much fuel have we got?’ I asked Selwyn.

‘About a teacupful.’

There would be no more until after Christmas. We ought to walk, but she was so small and it was cold. And this way it was over quicker. Pamela got in with a practised air, her face set. She was carrying a bag holding the smock and singlet and the bed-jacket I had given her to wear. ‘When I was small I did ballet.’ She peered out of the car at me, as if it was of great moment, and I had to be told this instant. ‘We used to go together. Mummy and me and Mr Dexter. It was Mr Dexter’s Humber car. Or it might have been Mr Watts’. I can’t remember. This isn’t a Humber car, though, is it?’

I didn’t know what to do. Whether to sit by Selwyn, and try to persuade him against giving her away, or beside Pamela, to drink in the last drops of her. Selwyn opened the passenger door for me, and paused. ‘Darling, would you prefer to stay here? It might be easier.’

‘I’ll come.’ I got into the back beside Pamela, and held her close to me.

She struggled out of my grasp. ‘That’s not comfy.’

‘Sit on my lap, then.’

‘No.’ She composed herself, and looked out of the window intently, as if at an unfolding panorama instead of the dank stretch of winter hedgerow.

I raised my voice so Selwyn could hear me. ‘Nobody has asked her what she wants.’

‘What?’ He didn’t turn his head. His hat brim bent the tops of his ears down. I leaned forward.

‘We haven’t asked her where she wants to be. Who she wants to stay with.’

‘I did, actually.’ He threw the words over his shoulder. ‘She says she wants to be with the children. The children and the pigs, she said.’

‘And the donkeys,’ said Pamela.

‘But you’ve got donkeys, remember?’ I scratched in my mind for their names. ‘Floriday, and the others?’

She was contemptuous. ‘They’re not real.’

We drove out of the village and up the lane shrouded in bare trees. The line of the hill travelled upwards along with us. I knew Speeds Farm of old, when I walked up there and Mr Speed drove the sheep down. After he died his daughter took the farm, and then she married a Henstrow. She had five children and now, with Pamela, she was to have another. To those that have, it shall be given. There were tussocks all the way up to the brow of the hill above Speeds Farm, where they’d chopped the trees down and left the stumps and the turf had grown over. When my mother and father were alive Edward and I used to take bread-and-butter picnics up there, and we’d sit down on the tussocks and look over at Beacon Hill across the valley. But that was long ago, ten years after the Great War, when nobody believed there could be another.

When the gate was in sight Selwyn drew the car to a halt. ‘Here we are.’

‘Why don’t you go on up into the yard?’

‘I don’t like the look of those ruts.’

Pamela and I got out of the car. Selwyn’s face was hollowed, slightly shiny behind the windscreen.

Pamela and I walked the remaining distance to the frosty, deserted yard. A collie loped towards us. Pamela put out her hand. ‘Good dog, good dog.’ The dog gave a long, ripping growl and she snatched her hand back again.

‘Not all dogs are good, Pamela.’

Mrs Henstrow appeared at the door. Her red hair was scraped into a round bun on the top of her head and her legs were bandaged, the crossovers running as neat as ears of wheat up the fronts of her calves. ‘My veins.’ She pointed at the bandages. ‘This is the best thing for them. My niece does it for me, she’s on her nurse training. Oh my lord, what a little one. I thought she’d be eight or nine. Let’s hope she’s not a gusher. I can’t abide a gusher. Keep clear of Tig, dear, he’ll give you a nasty nip. He don’t mean nothing by it, it’s his job.’

Pamela wound her hands into the front of her skirt, her face pale, round, uncertain.

‘Mrs Henstrow.’ I spoke in as low and as steady a voice as I could muster. ‘Have you been told what happened to Pamela?’

‘Oh yes.’ Mrs Henstrow rolled her eyes. ‘Her ma copped it in Southampton, down in the cellar of the Crown. That’s it, dearie, in you go. There were a fancy man, weren’t there. Oh, I’ve got my spies. Just because I spend all my days up here turning the collars on shirts and feeding stock don’t mean I’m ignorant. He copped it too, the fancy man, didn’t he, so there is some justice. Have you got the coupons, dear?’

Her kitchen was dark, clean, and full of male people. They all rose to their feet with many scrapes of boots as Mrs Henstrow said, ‘There’s John, Archie and Newton, they’re my three boys, and them two old lads are the Lusty brothers, the farriers. They don’t talk much. Come up for the shires today. The girls are out in the hayloft doing lord knows what. Gossiping, I expect. I must say, I thought she’d be nine or ten.’

The young boys were different shades of their mother’s rusty red. Two elderly men, both with mouths that pushed forward and turned down like coal scuttles, nodded. Pamela squeezed my fingers.

‘The coupons,’ repeated Mrs Henstrow, with extra clarity, as if English were not my mother tongue.

The kettle began to whistle. ‘I need to speak to my husband,’ I said above the thin wail. ‘He’s parked down in the lane.’

‘Didn’t fancy it, did he?’ Mrs Henstrow said, spooning tea into a pot. ‘Little ones can bawl so, can’t they, when things don’t go their way.’

‘Please, no tea—’

‘Don’t worry, madam, it’s not for you. I was going to get out some rosehip syrup, dear,’ she said to Pamela, who was standing dumb beside me and didn’t so much as nod. ‘Hmm. Another one with no manners. No syrup for those with no manners. Oh, no. We’ll have to do something about that.’

I took Pamela by the hand and we left Mrs Henstrow considering what precisely she would do about Pamela’s manners. We made our way across the yard. She called after us, ‘You can leave her here, my dear, while you fetch her things,’ but I didn’t turn my head. Pamela skidded on an icy puddle and I tugged her upright before she fell, my legs shaking so much that I too almost lost my footing.

Selwyn was waiting, huddled deep into his scarf with his hat tipped forward.

‘I’m not leaving her there, Selwyn.’

He sat up, peered out at Pamela.

‘I don’t like that dog. But I like dogs. But that one is a dog, and I don’t like him. Even so, I do like dogs.’ She stood, trying to reconcile it, run through by deep shivers.

Selwyn looked from Pamela to me. Then he got out of the car. ‘Get in and keep warm,’ he said.

We waited four or five minutes. I showed Pamela the game with the folded fingers. ‘Here’s the church and here’s the steeple. Open the doors and here’s the people.’ She laced her soft little fingers at the knuckles and turned her joined hands over, and laughed to see a wiggling row of pink fingertips. Here were the people, praying on their knees. Here were the church bells, tolling for the invasion. They’d been silent since the beginning of the war, but when the time came they’d ring out over our streets and fields. At first we’d simply not believe it, and then we’d begin to believe it, and we’d start running, and shouting. We’d hold out our hands to each other, and start to speak urgently about the children. I fastened my arms around this child, though it squashed her a little, and then I too laced my fingers together to keep her in my embrace.

Selwyn was making his way back to us. He got into the car without speaking and started the engine. As we jolted down the track he made a sort of flapping gesture to me with one hand. I interpreted it as best I could.

‘Pamela, you won’t be staying there. The dog was too nasty.’

After a few minutes we ran out of fuel. The engine died and we coasted the rest of the way down the hill. The tyres tore quietly over the tarmac. At the bottom Selwyn stopped the car and went to fetch the boys from the house. Pamela began to cry. ‘Will I go somewhere else now, or can I go to bed?’

‘Sweetheart, you won’t go anywhere before morning.’

Selwyn returned with Hawley and Jack. They pushed the car while Pamela and I steered. She sat on my lap holding the wheel, turning it and straightening it again with me until the car was back at the mill and safely inside the garage. For five or ten minutes we were absorbed in this task like a happy family. Elizabeth appeared and silently put out her hand to Pamela. The boys swarmed past her into the house. Soon Selwyn and I were alone in the hall.

‘Just because I couldn’t leave her with that vile woman—’

‘Doesn’t mean you won’t find someone else,’ I said. ‘A more kindly farmer’s wife. I know. You’ve already made yourself clear.’

He shook his head. We stood in the dim light of the hall. He touched my face with his fingertips. Something I usually adored, but today my skin felt numb. I had to find something of him, grab some scrap of the man I loved, out of this wasteland.

‘Please play the piano, Selwyn.’

‘I haven’t the heart.’

‘For Pamela, then, if not for me. Please.’

Pamela wanted ‘Jingle Bells’. It was only a few days to Christmas. Selwyn played it for her roughly three dozen times. It was getting dark, but not yet time for supper. Pamela and I cut out some newspaper dolls, some with skirts, some with trousers, and the boys joined us to sit cross-legged and snipping, and Pamela spread them out on the floor.

Elizabeth came in and sat on the arm of the sofa. Selwyn asked her what song she would like to hear.

‘I’ve always been fond of “Sally Gardens”. I’m making a macaroni cheese.’ She and I sang together and Pamela dragged the lopsided dolls across the carpet. Selwyn’s fingers pranced over the keys, his eyes hidden behind his glasses. Pamela went into the kitchen and Elizabeth followed her. His fingers stilled immediately.

We ate the macaroni cheese. It was delicious: all that baked hot milk and flour and those shavings of cheese. I had taught Elizabeth to make the body of the dish with milk only, and as much salt as was tasty, and to reserve the cheese slivers for the top. Selwyn quarantined the mixture in his mouth before manfully swallowing but the rest of us ate it up with gusto. We put the house in order, and went to bed, all of us, at eight o’clock in the evening.

I put Pamela on the small bed in the dressing room and admitted Selwyn back into our double. Selwyn lay on his back, hair tufted against the pillow. Our first night together we’d read poetry, Edward Thomas, lounging on the pillows. We still did this from time to time but I sensed it wouldn’t happen again for a long while. So little time it took, for a small girl to bring me to this. The least likely thing to happen, as astonishing as an imago in a chrysalis. I let my gaze become absorbed into the gloom of the curtains, their heavy, somewhat threadbare blue velvet a powdery grey in the lamplight.

‘You would never have let her stay,’ I said. ‘Even if there had been no war.’

‘If there had been no war, she would never have been here.’

That was unanswerable.

‘Somebody will come for her, Ellen.’

‘No. She’s got no one. Her aunt hasn’t been in touch for ten years. Her father’s probably forgotten she existed.’

He made a sound somewhere between a sigh and a groan. ‘If this child is taken away from you, and you suffer, I don’t know how I’ll forgive myself. You say you don’t want children, but—’

‘I don’t want children.’

‘You want Pamela.’

I stroked my hand over the linen sheet. The sheets didn’t smell of lavender now, since Elizabeth and I hadn’t found the time or the spirit, last summer, to make up new lavender bags. I was eighteen the first time I saw this bed. It was so beautiful. The headboard of polished wood the colour of toffee, and the sheets heavy, crisp and scented. They had reminded me of my earliest childhood, before our ruin. I pulled myself away from his reaching arms and got off the bed. I started tearing my clothes off, tossing my woollens onto the floor, stripping my legs of their stockings. I trampled my way out of my skirt and stood barefoot in my slip, tugging pins out of my hair.

‘Darling, do put on your dressing gown. You’ll catch cold.’

‘You think this room is chilly?’ I laughed without pleasure. ‘When I was a girl I woke with frost on the carpet. The carpet that we put on our bed, Mother and I. It stank of mice, even in the frost, but we couldn’t get to sleep without it.’

He got out of bed and came to me. His pyjama-clad body was warm against mine and this time I let him put his arms around me. ‘I’d be the last person to make light of your hard years.’ He pressed his cheek against the top of my head. ‘But – forgive me, I can’t see what bearing they have.’

I released myself from his embrace, stood so that he could see my face. ‘What bearing?’ I shook my head in wonderment. ‘Seriously, you can’t see it?’

He gave me a baffled, unhappy stare. ‘You told me how you and your mother suffered. How you had to scrimp and save—’

‘Scrimp and save.’ I laughed again. ‘Do you know why I’m not frightened of the cold? Because I know about it. How you can let it sink right into your bones, and it won’t damage you at all. I know how to suck on a pebble to keep hunger pangs away. You have to do that, you know, if you’ve just given a child your own food. The pain’s excruciating otherwise. And I can carry her, further than anyone. I can walk twenty miles with nothing inside me but the skin of a baked potato. You say I’ve got no idea about war, and shelling. Well, you’ve got no idea what I can endure for her sake.’

He stood in front of me, a mild man, a clever man. Pyjama’d, bespectacled. So beloved. Pushed beyond his bounds. He’d tried to push me, too. But he’d simply forced me down onto my bedrock.

‘I don’t care what happens after the war,’ I told him. ‘That’s not the point. You can put her where you want, but I’ll go with her. She needs me now. Me. Do you see? We’re the same, Pamela and I. I was a child like her. A child who lost everything in the world.’