The Girl Now Leaving Read online

Mr Barrit says, ‘Is that a fac’? In my day we never had picnics.’

  The lorry rolls on down the road on the other side, allowing Hector, the driver, to return his attention to the conversation. ‘You learnt to swim yet, Luey?’

  ‘No. Ray said he wouldn’t mind teaching me, but he’s got to learn himself first, and he haven’t got bathers yet.’

  ‘All Pompeyites is the same. Live by all that sea, yet how many of us does more than have a bit of a splash around? I don’t reckon there’s a Pompey matelot ever taught himself to swim.’

  When Uncle Hec said he would tuck her away somewhere in the cab, she never expected a journey where she would ride so high up, with windows both sides and in front. It is better for seeing than even upstairs on a bus, but, now that they have left the streets and houses, she is not so sure that she wants to see. Now they are over the crest, Portsmouth is lost behind them and there is only a vast, empty green land to be seen.

  ‘There you are then, Lu, what do you think of that? There’s your proper country for you.’ He switches the engine off and indicates the emptiness to his right, and as Lu bends forward she is exposed to rural Hampshire for the first time in her life.

  She does not see those pleasant pastures, nor any unclouded hills, and the great aquamarine dome covers emptiness. Whichever way she looks, there is nothing but open land. She has grown up with the sea within walking distance, so she is not unfamiliar with a distant horizon, but back home there are always the hills of the Isle of Wight not far away. There the sea is never still and quiet.

  This vast, uninhabited, empty land is still and quiet and very, very alarming.

  Yet this empty space is The Country where she is being sent, where she is supposed to enjoy herself and get well.

  Her stomach clenches with anxiety. She had never imagined it would be empty or so endless. In the clear air, for as far as she can see to her right, there are just fields and fields and fields and fields. No guiding landmarks, no roads, no houses or people, just a few little trees. How can anybody find their way in a place with no houses or shops or churches? The map on the classroom wall shows England as such a small country. Miss said that millions of people live in England, so Lu had supposed that everywhere was like home. Miss had shown them a picture of the Russian steppes where people didn’t live, and the Sahara which was empty and where there were mirages and no water. But she never said anything about empty England. Yet its emptiness was only just the other side of the hill from home.

  ‘There aren’t any people, Uncle Hec, Where are they?’

  ‘What people, my lover?’

  ‘People who lives in the country. There isn’t no houses.’

  The Dutch courage that Ray had given her is draining away. He said she would like it. How did he know? Pictures of the country in storybooks always had cows and sheds, and pretty cottages surrounded with trees, and mothers standing at the doors watching children and sheep. But it was all empty, like the red dreams in her Dip fever, where any people who did come shrank down to dots till they disappeared.

  And here, just like the Dip dreams, you could run and run and never get anywhere.

  What would happen if you got lost or hurt? Who would hear you?

  Where did people get their food if there wasn’t a Co-op or a greengrocer’s?

  Her stomach rumbles and she feels chilly from Uncle Hec’s open window.

  ‘Oh, there’s villages up over yonder. There’s Soake and Denmead; there’s even World’s End. Don’t you worry, there’s plenty of people about. A lot of them’ll be out there somewhere, ploughing and planting and that. Your Uncle Ted will be out on his land drilling or something.’

  Charlie Barrit sings, ‘Oh to plough and to sow and to reap and to mow.’ Hector joins in. He has a deep, tuneful voice. ‘And to be a farmer’s boy-oy-oy-oy, And to be a farmer’s boy. You know that, lover?’

  Lu nods.

  ‘Well, come on then, let’s hear you.’

  She drags her dismay away from the wilderness on her right and, as Uncle Hec gets the lorry going again, fixes her gaze on the road ahead where her attention is at once caught. ‘Look! There’s Buckingham Palace.’ And so it looks to Lu who is quite untutored in palaces. Ahead and to their right stands many-windowed Southwick House. Its façade with the sun on it appears finished in cake icing; a flag fluttering from its mast, it rises out of mature woodlands of full-grown oak and elm.

  ‘Nah, Buckingham Palace is half a hundred miles away,’ Uncle Hec says. ‘That’s Suthick House. We’re going there.’

  ‘Ah,’ says Charlie, in his playful tone, ‘but only to Suthick village. We forgot to bring our invitations to the palace. Dang me, what a stupid I be.’

  ‘Have you been there?’

  Uncle Hec shakes his head and takes his eyes away from the road to look at Lu and Charlie. ‘Not really our type, are they, Charlie?’

  ‘A bit on the rough side.’

  And now she knows that they are pulling her leg. And now they are clear of the scary, empty land. And now there are big trees and a long stretch of high wall. The sight of such a long stretch of red brick settles her stomach and encourages her blood to circulate. She says, ‘It’s a long road, what’s it called?’

  Mr Barrit says, ‘This is the Suthick Road, goes on far as Wickham.’

  Hector corrects, ‘Goes on as far as Winchester, Charlie.’

  ‘That’s true. And if you follows it to Winchester, there you got a choice: you can carry on north and go to Newbury, or turn east and go to Devizes.’

  ‘No, Charlie. If you’re going to give the gel a geography lesson, make sure you haven’t got it ass about face – it’s west to Devizes.’

  Charlie Barrit pulls a face and puts his hand over his mouth like he was a dunce. ‘Your Uncle Hec’s right, I never can remember which is my left hand and which is my right.’

  Lu says, ‘Ralph says that’s a sign of being intelligent.’

  ‘There you are then,’ says Charlie. ‘I always said there was a professor’s brain hid away somewhere in here. I think I’ll ask for a raise.’

  Hector says, ‘Now asking for a raise don’t strike me as a very intelligent thing to do, Professor Barrit.’

  The two draymen laugh, disposing of some of the apprehension about what it is going to be like when she is dropped off at Aunty May’s, and making Lu begin to imagine that she has sat between them and done this journey a dozen times. She knows very well that this chitchat and joking is for her benefit, but that doesn’t lessen her enjoyment. The lorry is a small, enclosed place and she feels, hears and smells the big men who rock from side to side, their hard, strong, safe arms that can lift a beer-crate crushing gently against her own arms. She likes the feel of the lorry, thrumming and swaying; the smell of the men’s blue overalls, oily, dusty, beery; the soap-smell of their shirts fresh on that morning because it is Monday; she likes the thought of the contents of her bag, her comics, her toothbrush and the skirt and top made specially to go to Aunty May’s from a couple of Bon Marché remnants.

  She shouldn’t have had those doubts about Ralph. She was going to stay with her aunty and uncle, they were relations, Wilmotts like herself.

  ‘Are you sure you wouldn’t like a raspberry drop, Uncle Hec?’

  ‘Well, now you mention it, I could just do with something to take the taste of this dust out of my mouth till we gets to Suthick.’

  The three of them sit sucking with noisy enjoyment until they come to a signpost finger pointing to Southwick. Hector puts his arm out of the window and signals with a stiff hand that he is turning right, and they all scrunch quickly.

  The narrow winding village street and the huddled little houses might be seen – by a stranger who knows nothing of their unhealthy interiors – as most picturesque and romantic. The Bells is the pub where they are to make the first delivery. It is a white, thatched building, set at the edge of a birch and hazel spinney. It looks secure and comforting.

  ‘Now, if you wants to go to the you-kn
ow, just go round the back and you’ll see the “Ladies” sign on a shed. Come back and sit on that bench outside the tap room over there. We shan’t be long about.’

  Lu doesn’t want the you-know, which is as well for it is a privy with a wooden seat over a pit. But because she is curious about the back of the pub, she goes where Uncle Hec had indicated. Lu has never seen the likes of a pub like this; pubs at home are bigger and many are done over in shiny tiles with letters that read ‘Home Brew – Stout – Porter – Best Wines and Spirits’. They were some of the first words Ralph had taught her; then he had bought a Rupert Bear annual for her fourth birthday and begun to teach her to read properly. She wishes there was some way to get a message back to Ralph to tell him that he was right, it is lovely to ride in a lorry.

  The Bells has been an inn for centuries, and over that time it has expanded, taking over a couple of adjoining cottages, its uneven exterior and undulating roof-line showing the expansion. Its only cohesion is in its overall lime and rubble finish, and the shaggy thatch used by birds and mice at nesting time as a kind of builders’ supply depot. Small windows are overhung by the roof, and at the front is a narrow door shielded by a stone-built weather-porch. It is old. In the seventeen hundreds, no drays called to roll wooden casks of ale into the cool, windowless outhouse; in those days the ales, beers and ciders were brewed on the premises, often by the innkeeper’s wife who made do with vessels filched from her kitchen, vessels with names that had by the twentieth century become almost obsolete or at least curious or romantic, the pipkins, the pins, the gugglets and the jeroboams. In many ways the original inn, minus its extensions, is so little changed that its original occupants would feel at home. Only recently a white ceramic hand-basin, bath and indoor flush lavatory have been installed, but these still drain into an ancient cesspool.

  The Bells at Southwick experiences in winter a climate which can be much foggier and degrees colder than on the seaward side of the Portsdown Hills where the air is warmed by the Solent and Spithead waters. Even so, The Bells is still in the cosseted south, where spring and summer gardens can bloom five or six weeks earlier and last longer than those in the north. It is not yet April; even so the spring season is especially advanced when Lu Wilmott is drawn into the garden of The Bells.

  Seen through her eyes, here is a birthday cottage she believes in. Familiar flowers, some of whose names she knows like the cherry-blossom, tulips and daffodils that grow in Portsmouth parks. She hears a church bell distantly and counts as it strikes the hour. Seven… eight… She can hardly believe that it is only eight o’clock and here she is in another world.

  She sits in the sun, her knees tight together, her hands clasped to stop herself worrying again. A lady, nothing like the rosy, picture-book mothers, comes out through the porch-door carrying a tray of drinks which she puts down on the table where Lu is seated. Her hair is long and fair, done in deep waves clipped back on one side in a long hair-slide, a star of sparkling diamonds with a tail of diamonds shooting out of it. In her ears she wears little white birds. Her silky, rose-printed dress has two rows of frills instead of sleeves. She is lovely, made up like a film star and smelling of scent.

  ‘Hello, sweetheart. You must be old Hec’s little niece.’

  Lu jumps up, her face flushed with shyness. ‘Yes, miss, I’m Lu.’

  The lady smiles. ‘Hello, Lu, I’m Peggy – Vera really, but nobody ever calls me that.’

  ‘My mum’s called Vera, Uncle Hec calls her Vere, and it’s my second name.’

  ‘Just fancy that. Uncle Hec your mum’s brother?’

  ‘My dad’s, he’s in the Navy.’

  ‘One of the boys in blue. You wasn’t surely christened Lu?’

  ‘No, Louise.’

  ‘That’s a beautiful name. Why do you let people call you Lu?’

  Lu thinks for a moment. ‘Because I never thought of it.’

  ‘Well, if it was me, I’d start thinking about it. Louise has got a real touch of class… style. Louise Wilmott, that sounds nice.’

  It did!

  Peggy smiles at her again. She is so beautiful, all made up with red lipstick, eyelashes black, and blush on her cheeks: Lu longs to be her. On special occasions Lu’s mum does herself up like this and is changed like magic; Lu loves it when her mum makes her face up. ‘Sit back down, sweetheart. Here, I brought you some cherryade and crisps, help pass the time till Hec and Charlie are finished down the cellar.’

  Peggy pushes the red drink and packet of Smith’s potato crisps to Lu’s side of the table. Lu sits down and Peggy joins her, holding her own clear bubbly drink in one hand, and a cork-tipped cigarette in the other. ‘I hear you are off on holiday then.’ Lu is about to say that she has had the Dip and is going to her aunty’s to recuperate when she realizes it sounds better to say that it’s a holiday. Sounds more like Peggy’s dress than next-door’s moulty chickens.

  ‘Yes, miss, I’m going on holiday to my aunty and uncle’s who’s got a place at Wickham. Have you heard of Wickham?’

  ‘Oh yes, everybody round here knows Wickham. It isn’t far along the road here. Nice little place, big square with little shops all round, a bit sleepy for me… Still, a bit livelier than Suthick, though. Come on, eat up, if I was slim as you I’d have a packet too. Or would you rather have biscuits?’

  ‘No, thank you, I love crisps.’

  Suddenly Lu is no longer lanky, thin or skinny. She is slim. Adverts always say things like that: ‘Slim-waisted style’, ‘Slim fitting’, ‘Be slim!’, but never, ‘Be a skinny beanpole!’ She smiles at Peggy, takes a swallow of cherryade, breaks open the crisps and finds the blue knot with the salt, offers the bag to Peggy who shakes her head and raises her cigarette, then crunches the brown, oily treats. At tuppence a bag, it is only once in a blue moon that Lampeter Street kids get such treats. ‘I’m supposed to be going away to get some flesh on my bones.’

  Peggy smiles and blows smoke at the same time. ‘Well, that’d be a treat for some of us. Mind you—’ she leaned in Lu’s direction and held up her glass – ‘this don’t help.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Gin and tonic. Mother’s Ruin. It’s no good for anybody, you know. Don’t let anybody start you on it.’

  ‘Isn’t it nice then?’ Lu found it so easy to talk to her.

  She laughed again. ‘Oh yes, it’s lovely, that’s the trouble, once you had one you soon want another one. I suppose it’s not much good living in a pub if you got a taste of it.’

  ‘Do you live here?’

  ‘Sort of, I’m the barmaid. The landlord’s a widower, so I’m a sort of substitute landlady. Right out here, you got no choice but to live in.’

  ‘It’s a pretty house.’

  ‘Yes, it’s all right. I never thought I’d make a country girl, but I reckon I could take to it, given the right sort of persuasion. Needs a car though. Hello, here’s the happy wanderers.’

  Uncle Hec and Mr Barrit come out, each carrying a half-empty tankard of beer, Mr Barrit wheeling the handcart which he returns to its place under the bed of the lorry. Lu is almost sorry to see them; she has never met anybody like Peggy, who speaks to Lu as though she were a real person.

  ‘Now then, Peg, what you been putting our little gel up to?’

  ‘I wouldn’t put her up to anything, Hec. She’s a really pretty girl, and she speaks lovely.’

  ‘That’s her mum, a reg’lar crack-jaw she can be when she wants.’

  She turns to Lu and smiles. ‘You’re lucky then, Louise. A pity a few more children didn’t have mothers that taught them how to speak decent. Now, you make sure these two brings you in when you’ve had your holiday.’ She turns to Uncle Hec. ‘I want to see what she’s like when she’s back on her feet.’

  Uncle Hec drinks the last of his beer and wipes the froth from his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘Thanks, Peg, but this won’t get the baby a pair of trousers!’

  Lu drinks the last drop of cherryade and puts what is left of the crisps in
her cardigan pocket. Suddenly she wants to pee. Uncle Hec is tying down the tarpaulin, so she would have time, but she doesn’t like to ask in front of everybody. Peggy says quietly in Lu’s ear, ‘Might be a good idea to go while you got a chance.’ Lu nods vigorously, grateful for Peggy’s kindness. ‘Come on, don’t go round to that old bog-hut, there’s one indoors.’

  When Lu comes out, Peggy is holding a full bottle of cherryade and several packets of crisps and biscuits. ‘I’ll just pop these in a bag and give them to Hec to put in the cab for you. It’s not much, but I know it’s nice to have a little treat when you’re on holiday.’

  Lu blushes at not having the words to thank her enough. ‘Thank you ever so much. Do you know, I got some new comics, my brother bought them for me, and some sweets, and a new toothbrush.’ She grins at Peggy. ‘I’ve got ever so many new things.’

  Peggy stands for a few seconds looking at Lu, then, taking Lu’s hair in a bunch, she unclips the sparkling hair-slide from her own hair, and with it clips back Lu’s. ‘How’s that, then? Shows off those lovely eyes and this beautiful hair. You’ll find it cooler off your face.’

  ‘Can I wear it?’

  ‘It’s yours. You’ll be a star yourself one day, just you see. Come back and see me when you are.’

  Lu doesn’t know what to say. A star of diamonds must have cost a packet.

  ‘Now get on your way, or your Uncle Hec will blame me if he don’t have time for another pint when he gets to The King’s.’

  Lu longs for words that sound equal to her feelings, but can only think of the tallyman who always says, ‘Obliged to you, Mrs Wilmott, much obliged.’

  ‘Thank you, ever so much… really. I won’t lose it.’

  Back inside The Bells, Peggy poured herself another small gin as Dick came up from the cellar. ‘Did you see that little girl Hec Wilmott had with him, Dick?’

  Dick Briardale, the landlord of The Bells, shook his head absently. Dick Briardale, widower, nicely off, handsome and with healthy appetites, had had his thoughts engaged elsewhere for the past half-hour.

  ‘You should have seen her. Breaks your heart to see a kid looking like that. She’s being sent to some place in Wickham hoping to get her better.’ She shook her head sadly, sipped and held the spirit in her mouth before swallowing. ‘Breaks your heart… Kids like that haven’t got a chance; they don’t have anything in reserve.’