We Must Be Brave Read online

  ‘Where are we?’ I said, but she took no notice, struggling as she was with the lock of a wooden door set into the wall. After a shove from Daniel the door creaked open and we filed into a kitchen garden where the newly turned beds lay black in the sunshine. On the other side of a hedge at the top of the kitchen garden rose the upper storey and peaked roof of a great brown house.

  I clutched Lucy’s arm. ‘This is the back of Upton Hall. How on earth do you come to have a key?’

  ‘Lady Brock gave it me. She got sick of us climbin over.’ Lucy pointed. ‘There she is now.’

  And indeed there she was, a tall woman in a mackintosh pushing a man in a wheelchair along a stone path between the beds. She glanced in our direction, raised a long arm in a salute. The man in the wheelchair, a wraith tucked into coverlets and rugs, also lifted his hand.

  ‘That’s Sir Michael,’ Daniel said. ‘Gas got him in the war.’

  ‘Oh! Sir Michael!’

  I gasped the name. I knew about the gas – everybody did. But he’d been upright the last time I’d seen him, greeting his guests in the ballroom of Upton Hall on Boxing Day. Beside him had stood a suit of armour polished to a brilliant silver, one gauntlet thrust out for the guests to shake. And I had done so, pink-cheeked and nicely plump in my tartan Christmas dress, well-nourished on my father’s rapaciousness – on Sir Michael’s money, truth to be told, since my father had died owing him upward of three hundred guineas.

  I sidled behind Daniel. I could have been carrying my father on my shoulders, his dead body in a pedlar’s pack, so enormous was my shame. I wished it would press me into the earth. ‘They mustn’t see me,’ I whispered.

  Lucy tutted. ‘They won’t take any account of us. Look, they’re goin now and all.’

  I watched Lady Brock turn the chair. The two figures receded and then disappeared through the gate at the top of the kitchen garden. ‘I don’t care. I still want to go home.’

  ‘No, Ellen.’ Daniel was firm. ‘Not till you’ve had a look at our bolthole.’

  The shed stood among the greenhouses at the top of the kitchen garden. The light came from one small window. A polished charcoal stove, bearing an equally gleaming kettle, squatted in the middle of the room. There was a scuffed leather armchair and sundry folding camp stools and milking stools as well as a wide, flat tree stump. A low shelf bore a panoply of objects – lanterns and gas lamps, boxes and chests of wood and tin, enamel mugs. And there was a clean, wholesome odour of compost.

  Daniel picked up a tall, cylindrical container bearing a scratched colour picture of a girl in a white dress alighting from a horse-drawn carriage. He shook it by his ear, seemingly satisfied by the rattle.

  ‘What’s in there?’

  ‘Lickrish.’ He went and crouched by the stove to light it. Lucy took the kettle and ducked outside, and I heard her filling it at a garden tap. ‘Whose shed is this?’ I asked her, when she came back.

  ‘Mr Kennet’s, of course.’

  ‘Oh!’

  ‘Didn’t we say? We’ve been comin up here since we were little ones, Dan and me. When our folks wanted us out from under …’ She spoke in an offhand manner, busy rummaging in her bag. Daniel sat without speaking on the tree stump, intent on levering the lid off the liquorice tin. After a moment Lucy produced two school exercise books and held them out to me.

  ‘I can’t get the hang of the work, dear, you know that. I never could. And Daniel’s got no patience with it any more.’

  Daniel was still trying to open the tin, so bent on the task, it seemed, that he couldn’t meet my eyes. His cheeks, though, were crimson.

  I turned the books in my hands. Both were wretchedly dog-eared and ink-blotched, the arithmetic branded with red crosses, the grammar sentences petering out like tracks into desert sand. The owners would turn fourteen this year, as would I, and school would be finished for us all. Miss Yarnold had spent seven years trying to teach Lucy to read and write, and she had failed. Daniel was already far more use at a cattle auction than he was behind a rickety deal desk that was starting to squash his sturdy knees.

  ‘Do help us out, dear.’

  Lucy’s voice was soft. I looked up, but she wouldn’t meet my eyes. She too had a rare dark flush on her cheekbones.

  I sat down on a milking stool. ‘What will we do for pen and ink?’

  The lid popped off the liquorice tin, and I was given two pieces, along with a nib pen and a phial of dried-up brown ink, which we woke with a drip from the kettle. I started to write up Daniel’s lesson, making sure the numbers and letters were as tall and wavering as his, my jaws fused by a glorious black salty sweetness that seemed to run directly into my veins. ‘Oh, this is delicious,’ I told him, somewhat slushily, from between clenched teeth. ‘Now, I’m making some purposeful errors—’

  ‘Oh, Ellen!’

  ‘Come on, Dan,’ Lucy said. ‘Miss Yarnold don’t believe in miracles. We don’t care about the marks. We just can’t stand to do it ourselves.’

  Lucy’s figures I made small and hatched and oddly spaced, the spelling carefully idiosyncratic. Pausing to deliberate how Lucy might spell harbour, I stared up at the far wall of the shed, behind the armchair. Great towers of earthenware pots had been stacked there – long ago, it seemed, for the ones at the bottom were greened with lichen and moss, and some were cracked and crumbling. Lucy followed my gaze.

  ‘I don’t know how Bill sits there, under that lot,’ she said. ‘They’re an accident waiting to happen.’

  ‘All our days are numbered, Lucy Horne.’ Mr Kennet was standing smiling in the doorway. He tipped his hat at me. ‘I see they’ve collared you at last, Miss Calvert.’

  I nodded, rendered mute by liquorice and a sudden shyness.

  He took four mugs and a teapot and caddy from the shelf. I started up to help him, afraid that the things would fall from his few splayed and cradling fingers, but Daniel gave me a shake of the head and I sat down again. ‘Did you know,’ Mr Kennet went on, ‘I found that lickrish tin in the wood at Dammstrasse, in 1917?’

  Lucy was gaping. ‘So it’s – how old, Dan?’

  ‘We’re in 1934,’ said Daniel, ‘so it’s …’

  ‘Seventeen,’ I supplied.

  ‘Seventeen years old,’ Lucy said, ‘and you’re givin it us to eat? That’s disgustin. Shame on you, Mr Kennet, for never tellin us.’

  Mr Kennet arranged the tea things on the tree stump and sat down in the armchair, his eyes half-closed in quiet mirth.

  ‘Dammstrasse.’ Daniel turned to me. ‘That was his last battle, you know. Do you want some baccy rolling, Bill?’

  ‘Don’t you Bill me.’

  A friendly growl.

  ‘Dammstrasse was just the way station,’ Lucy said. ‘The name of the battle was Messines. Let me do the cigs, Dan. I make ’em neater.’ She turned to me. ‘They blew a hole under Jerry the size of a coal mine.’

  Mr Kennet nodded. ‘Well might you speak of mines, my girl. General Plumer touched ’em off and the whole world jumped into the air. Dawn broke so quick that day. I think the sun was hurrying to see what the row was about.’

  I saw instantly from the way they nodded, Lucy and Dan – Dan sombrely lacing his fingers over his knees, Lucy busy with tobacco and cigarette papers – that they had heard this before, and it was not a time for questions.

  ‘When the sun was fully risen we moved off to Dammstrasse, on our way to Messines Ridge,’ Mr Kennet went on. ‘We were still deaf from the mines, so we were a pack of ghosts, it seemed like, with boots that made no sound. Sun rose higher, and soon it was a broiling-hot morning. I found that tin in the grass and tucked it in my pack. Seven o’clock we went forward. Then came my bit of shrapnel. Dan’s father, and Lucy’s, they went on to Passchendaele, but I came home. All three of us came home in the end.’

  Daniel rubbed his chin. ‘I’ve always thought how funny it is, Luce. That both of us had uncles that copped it, and both of us had fathers that lived.’

  Lucy, who was run
ning the pointed tip of her tongue along the edge of a cigarette paper, stopped midway and cackled. ‘We couldn’t have had dads that copped it, could we. ’Cause then we’d never have been born. You great lummox.’

  ‘Colonel Daventry came back all right.’ Daniel went on with his thoughts, unperturbed. ‘But Sir Michael was properly crocked up. There’s no sense in it.’

  ‘No sense or meaning.’ Mr Kennet cast his eyes at the ceiling. ‘Who else, now? Mr Parr, of course. Of Parr’s Mill. He drove ambulances, got a medal for it too. Old Mr Parr, who had the mill before, was his uncle. But old Mr Parr lost both his sons at the Somme, and so now that he’s dead too, the mill has fallen to the present Mr Parr, his nephew, being the survivor of that generation.’

  I knew who Colonel Daventry was; we used to see him on Boxing Day when the hunt left from The Place, his house with its huge courtyard at the front. A bright, friendly, ginger-haired man offering a stirrup cup to the Master of Hounds. Mr Parr was less distinct. Tall, I fancied, perhaps fair-haired, standing next to Lady Brock in church. I couldn’t be sure. There were a lot of such men in the front pews. Mother and I went so seldom that I never got to tell them apart. It wasn’t as if they were going to speak to us.

  ‘Miss Calvert, I would like to say …’ Mr Kennet cleared his throat. ‘I would like to say that Captain Calvert fought very bravely at the craters. At Saint Eloy.’

  The kettle burbled slowly to the boil. My father was not singled out for valour, but all the same I had heard it before as a young girl, that he had shown courage under the guns. But I had only a grain of pride left, the rest blasted away by my searing embarrassment at the mention of his name.

  ‘I’d very much prefer it if you called me Ellen, Mr Kennet.’

  ‘Right you are.’ He proffered the tin. ‘More lickrish, Ellen?’

  ‘No thank you.’ It was still clinging to my teeth. My tongue felt stained dark with it. I started to smile. ‘It’s only the tin that’s seventeen years old, isn’t it. Not the liquorice itself.’

  He winked. ‘Bassett’s,’ he whispered. ‘Bought it in Waltham.’

  From that day on, I completed homework for Lucy and Dan. We would meet in Mr Kennet’s shed, and sometimes he would join us for a cup of tea. At other times we’d see only his back bent, digging, or the shadow of his hatted head in one of the greenhouses. We could come and go as we pleased, eating everything as we travelled the lanes. Our diet changed with the seasons: we nibbled the stalks of fresh long grass, pulled honeysuckle flowers, then blackberries. We fell upon the hazel trees, eating the nuts unripe, the green shells bending between our molars, our tongues and teeth seeking out the sour white flesh. Even the squirrels had more continence. One day I went with Daniel and Lucy back to the Stour House. My old house, that I hadn’t seen since we left: I agreed on impulse. Dan’s friend John Blunden, who used to mow the orchard with his father, came too. John told us that a family who made marmalade lived there now: nobody liked them, and I was glad of that. So I joined them, and we took apples from the orchard that used to be mine, climbing the wall and bagging the windfall cookers. We did our thieving down at the far end where the brambles grew and I tried not to raise my eyes towards the house. But all the same I caught a flash of red brick through the trees: the back of the laundry, it was, and it hit me in the heart. And afterwards I couldn’t smile, not even when we baked the apples in Mr Kennet’s stove and Dan tried to make John eat a piece of cooked worm. As they scuffled on the brick floor, bringing Mr Kennet from his planting in high dudgeon, I wondered what I had been thinking of, to visit that house again. As if it could ever be all right.

  When we went back to school I continued to sit with Amy and Airey at dinner-time, but now Miss Yarnold took to supplying us with dry rolls, one for each of us. But not every day, and not on regular days either, though we tried to work out a pattern. Then I overheard her with Miss Dawes in our playground at break-time. ‘I don’t have a great deal of surplus, in my personal economy,’ Miss Yarnold was saying, ‘but sometimes I confess I overbuy on dinner rolls, and they do end up here in school for the fatherless girls.’

  And Miss Dawes replied, ‘That’s very warm-hearted and commendable. Just make sure –’ and she leaned closer to Miss Yarnold ‘– that they don’t come to rely on them.’

  ‘My dear, what do you mean?’

  ‘Simply that the families in question, assuming the girls are fed at dinner-time, give them even shorter commons at night.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Miss Yarnold.

  I was in the corner by the fence but my loitering stance caught her eye, and I blushed for shame at eavesdropping. She cleared her throat and bustled inside, and the next day summoned me. ‘Here is threepence from my purse,’ she said, holding out the coins. ‘In return you shall assist me in the classroom. Start by taking a little lesson with …’ Her eyes travelled over the classroom as she listed the names. That afternoon I took charge of the twins Amy and Airey, and the Rail boys. Ernest and Stanley Rail were the children who’d lost everything in the fire that had consumed the back of their house when the rick caught alight – the boys for whom my mother and I, to my shame, hadn’t provided a stitch of clothing. They’d been thrown from the top window into waiting arms like a pair of puppies. Ernest Rail was the older and smaller of the two, with knobbed shoulders and a tiny triangular mouth.

  We huddled in a circle near the fire and I returned to the problem of 2a. ‘Consider twin lambs in their caul,’ I suggested. ‘Together they weigh ten pounds. So how heavy is one of the lambs?’ Silence. They fastened their eyes on their boots. I put out my hands to Airey. ‘Ten fingers, look. Ten pounds. Two hands. Two lambs.’ But Airey clenched her own hands in her lap.

  ‘Are they dead or alive?’ asked Stanley Rail.

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘It does. If they was dead I wouldn’t bother weighing ’em.’

  Amy sucked her teeth. ‘I bet they was dead. Mr Corey had a lamb that weighed ten pound on its own. So two lambs that didn’t weigh more’n ten pound wouldn’t be worth bothering about. Stan’s right.’

  Airey put up her hand.

  ‘Yes, Airey?’

  ‘Ellen, what will you buy with your threepence? Will you get a lardy cake from Mundays? I could go a slice of that.’

  There was another silence. I was about to let my spread hands fall when Ernest Rail reached over and tapped my right palm. ‘Five, Miss. One lamb weighs five pound.’

  Thanks to Miss Yarnold I managed to set our grocer’s bill on a downward slope. Mrs Legg, the grocer’s wife, was pleased. ‘Because of your worry, Miss Calvert, as much as the money. Because of it being on your shoulders. I’m not allowed to write it off, you do know that, dear?’ Although my coal was husbanded in a couple of barrels out by the fence where Mother couldn’t find it, there still wasn’t enough, and as it grew colder once more, Mother started to go to bed during the day. Mr Kennet roasted chestnuts for us and I came home in the dark with sooty fingers, already hungry again by the time I reached the Absaloms. My birthday came, my fourteenth, and this year Mother gave me her Bible. It was a true lady’s Bible, the white leather cover embossed with silver. Her confirmation cards were tucked inside.

  ‘Mother, really, you shouldn’t. At least keep these. They’re from your old friends.’ The cards mostly bore pictures of lilies, and the girls, who were called Ianthe, Vera, Gretel, wished her almost identical sorts of good luck for her confirmation, which they were sure would go swimmingly.

  Mother took the cards from me. ‘Those girls …’ Her eyes wandered around the room. ‘I can’t remember who they are now.’

  After Christmas I took to walking to keep warm, and while I roamed the lanes I pondered my future. Lucy was going to the kennels when she turned fourteen – she was three months younger than me – but I was staying at school, filling inkwells and tutoring the likes of Amy and Airey and the Rail boys, until something else happened to me. Perhaps nothing would, and I would remain there at Miss Yarnold’s side
for ever. I couldn’t allow that to happen.

  One day in February I climbed up into the attic, thinking that there might be some unfound books or papers there to distract me from my empty belly. In the gloom I first laid hands on a sheaf of magazine pages featuring women displaying underwear and had a sharp memory of Edward, young, mocking, red-lipped. How long, now, had he been gone? Over two years, and the money orders he sent were scant and rare as April snowfalls and as quickly melting. I wondered sometimes, had I been the high-seas adventurer, if Mother and Edward would have loved me as she and I loved him.

  Underneath the magazines there was a dark board book disfigured by the droppings of insects and mice. I brought it downstairs, in a shower of muck, cobwebs and dust.

  Typewriting: A Practical Manual Based Upon the Principles of Rhythm and Touch. By W. R. Sedley. I turned it over. The back had been eaten off but there was an odd-smelling oiled-paper sleeve which the mice had not liked. I drew out a folded keyboard made of thick card, and laid it flat on the table. The first eight pages of the book had been fused together by damp, so I began at Lesson Three. The top row of letter keys. 1. The letters E, R, U and I. Place your forefingers on the starter keys and engage them in reaching up from F to R and J to U.

  ‘Look, Ellen.’ Mother was coming into the room, her hands held out flat and wide apart in front of her. Across her spread palms a yard of Nottingham lace.

  ‘This is for you, dear. For your birthday.’ She smiled. ‘I had it on my dressing table, do you remember? The green velveteen cloth underneath and then this runner of lace. I put my tortoiseshell tray next to it, with my two tortoiseshell brushes – the hairbrush and the clothes brush – and my comb.’

  The lace floated on my palms. When I shut my eyes I could hardly feel it. In a shaft of interior light I saw the open doorway to her bedroom, the brushes gleaming in the morning sun, and through the sun came a sweet caramel odour, because downstairs in the kitchen Jennie had let the milk catch in the pan.