We Must Be Brave Read online

She thumped her way down, hopping from stair to stair. Six steps from the bottom her foot slipped. ‘Pamela!’ She pitched forward and so did I, catching her as she fell against my chest and knocked me to my knees. Behind me the telephone receiver cracked against the wall.

  ‘Be careful!’ I yelped the words as pain shot through my knee. Pamela, unhurt, threw herself on the floor and began to wail.

  ‘Good grief, Mrs Parr!’ Elizabeth was standing in the doorway.

  ‘We’re all right.’ I levered myself upright. ‘My dear, take her into the kitchen. I must telephone.’

  Sergeant Moore excused himself for eating his breakfast. His thin voice worked its way through crumbs. ‘I daresay you’d be unopposed in this scheme, madam.’

  ‘I’d hardly call it a scheme. Just a wish. Of course I have thought it over. Let’s say, a carefully considered wish …’

  Loud screams issued from the kitchen. ‘No! No! Not porridge!’

  ‘Do you have other children, Mrs Parr?’

  ‘None of my own, but we’ve got three evacuees.’ I pressed the receiver against my ear. ‘We’re used to looking after young children. We could be—’

  The kitchen door opened. ‘I! Am! Not! Eating! Nasty! Porridge!’ Pamela screamed, and thundered up the stairs.

  ‘– like a family to her!’ I shouted.

  ‘Just so,’ said the thin voice, with a little clearing of the throat, as Pamela thundered down again, giving a long, roaring bellow, as far as I could see for the simple pleasure of doing so.

  When I went into the kitchen she was sitting on a chair with her knees up and the singlet pulled over them. Elizabeth was stirring a pan on the range. ‘I’m just making some more porridge, Mrs Parr.’

  ‘I gathered.’ We both smiled. ‘I’m taking Pamela with me to Waltham to get some clothes.’

  ‘Look, I’m in a bag. I’m a bag girl.’

  ‘Yes, Pamela. Elizabeth dear, can you knock back the bread dough later?’

  Elizabeth nodded. ‘I can. But you’ll have to hurry if you’re to get the bus.’

  ‘Let’s go upstairs, Pamela, and get dressed.’ I made my way to the door but she remained on the chair, pulling the singlet over her toes. ‘You’re stretching the fabric now. Get up.’

  ‘Bag girl, bag girl. I want porridge.’

  ‘Oh. Now you want porridge. Well, you will have porridge, but you need to get dressed first.’

  ‘No, porridge now.’

  ‘It’s not ready. You must dress while it’s cooking. Do you want to go shopping?’

  ‘Yes, but after porridge.’

  Elizabeth was laughing. She lifted the pan from the heat. ‘You do what Mrs Parr tells you, young lady, or I’ll feed this to the hens.’

  Pamela got off the chair.

  Upstairs she raced into the dressing room and out again, squeezed herself under our bed. Her laugh was rattling, hysterical. I persuaded her out after three minutes or so. I brushed her hair and she seized the brush from me, tried to brush the back of her hair with the back of the brush, refused to surrender it. I pulled her nightwear off her and she lay on the floor bicycling her legs until I caught one hard little foot and then the other and forced them into the leg-holes of her clean, dry knickers.

  Now we had a bare ten minutes to get to the bus. And now she didn’t want to go shopping. I sat her on a kitchen stool; she jumped down. I pulled her back up onto the stool with my hands under her armpits and she went slack, as if boneless, flopping sideways.

  ‘Pamela, we’ll miss the bus!’

  A spoon of porridge went in, and then I pulled the flour-sack tabard over her head. ‘I don’t want to go shopping,’ she growled, her face pasty with anger.

  ‘I will carry you if I have to,’ I vowed.

  I did have to carry her. She dragged her feet, stumbled to her knees, squatted down, all the while yanking at my hand, until I was forced to hoist her into my arms. Just as I broke into a clumsy trot, my shopping basket bouncing against my hip, the bus to Waltham passed by the end of the lane on its way to the stop. I called out, ‘Wait! Wait!’ without the remotest chance of being heard. Perhaps a passenger was alighting: we might still make it. But the bus roared on, flashing through the gaps in the hedge, and I hurried the last few paces to the junction only to see it vanishing heedless into the dip at the bend of the road. I set Pamela on the ground, absolutely winded.

  ‘There,’ I said. ‘Look what you’ve done. We’ve missed the bus.’

  ‘I know.’ Her eyes were dancing and a delicious bloom had spread over her face.

  My own eyes stung with frustrated tears. I watched the bus emerge from the dip and rush on up the hill, through the bare trees and away to Waltham.

  ‘I was going to get you warm clothes and new knickers, Pamela, but I can’t now. You’ll just have to sit naked while I wash your old ones. Uncomfortable, and cold.’

  In response she started her nasty, rattling giggle.

  ‘Stop it!’ I shouted, but the giggling sharpened, accompanied now by a knowing leer.

  I shoved my hands deep in my pockets and breathed right to the bottom of my lungs. ‘Pamela. Please.’

  Her face crumpled and she started crying, high and strident as a lamb. I crouched down and put my arms around her.

  ‘Mummy’s not coming. Mummy’s not ever coming again.’

  ‘No. Darling, Mummy won’t come back.’

  ‘Never come back.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Mummy’s gone.’

  ‘Yes.’

  She pulled away from me, her wet eyes clear hazel, almost round.

  ‘She didn’t go with the candle man, did she. And she didn’t go to Aunt Margie where the grapes are either. Those are just tellings.’

  ‘That’s right, sweetheart.’

  She leaned back into me, her breath whiffling through her nose. Then she spoke again, her lips moving against my neck. ‘I bet you’re going to say she’s gone to Heaven.’

  I held her tight but without clinging. More to stop her falling. ‘Yes, Pamela, I am going to say that. Mummy’s gone to Heaven.’

  Smack – her small palm hit me squarely on the cheek. She sprang backwards out of my arms. ‘Nasty lady!’ she cried, and ran off down the road towards the blind bend. There was something coming the other way. The thunder of a big engine, filling the air.

  ‘Pamela!’ I dashed after her. ‘Pamela!’ I shouted again, as a tractor rounded the corner, pulling a huge, spined harrow that seemed to fill the road. I ran harder, flung my arm out and grasped hold of the flour sack, tugging her onto the verge at the very instant the tractor roared past us, the harrow bouncing after it, missing us by a foot. Pamela and I both fell down, she under me, screaming like a child in a collapsing building. She flailed at me but I grabbed her hands. She screamed higher: her palms were grazed.

  I heard a shout, turned my head. The tractor had slowed down and was pulling into the wide field gateway opposite the bus stop. Then the driver jumped down and ran back towards us. A small woman galumphing in wellingtons. As diminutive, sallow-faced, black-eyed as ever, and the black eyes just now furious.

  ‘Ellen Parr, what the bloody hell are you up to?’ bellowed Lucy Horne. ‘I nearly crushed that child!’

  6

  ‘WHAT DOES IT LOOK LIKE?’ I clung hard to Pamela, who was thrashing like a landed fish. ‘I’m trying to take care of her!’

  ‘You’re makin a bloody awful job of it!’

  ‘I’m aware of that!’ I cried.

  She glared back, panting, her almost permanent wheeze audible after the mad dash and the telling-off. Then I let go of Pamela and put my face in my hands.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘We missed the bus.’

  My cares came mounting one upon the other. It was the bus, and Pamela’s naughtiness, and her dead mother. It was the white flares over Southampton, and the smell of bombing in the people’s coats. And it was Lucy herself. I had no idea of the reason for her muteness, her ostentatiously blank stares, her turn
ing of the shoulder at church or in the village hall. She’d been my bridesmaid, for goodness’ sake.

  Well, she was certainly speaking to me now.

  I took my hands away from my face. She was holding a dumbstruck Pamela by one hand, alternately frowning at me and squinting up the road towards the tractor. Then she gave an explosive sigh. ‘Bloody hell, Ellen.’

  ‘Yes.’ I got slowly to my feet and took Pamela’s other hand. The child, ash-pale, allowed it. ‘I won’t keep you, Lucy,’ I said. ‘I need to take Pamela home and get her warm.’

  Lucy gave a short chuckle. ‘Darned if that’s not my old smock, under that flour sack.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Glad it came in handy.’

  Another pause, which Lucy filled with a long, ruminative sniff. Then she released Pamela. ‘I’ll just run that harrow into the field. I’m going home for my dinner anyway, so you might as well have a warm-up at my house. Harry Parker won’t know if I take a couple on the back.’ She gave me a dark glance. ‘If you was inclined to come, of course.’

  We rumbled into the village, perched on the back of the tractor seat. Pamela gazed dully at the receding road. I pointed out the milk churns on the high stand at the end of the main street, and she blinked slowly in response but didn’t turn her head to look. What did she care for churns, motherless as she was.

  Motherless, and in the charge, furthermore, of an incompetent, childless woman. Who would give a child to me? Perhaps she should go to a family after all. At least that way she wouldn’t end up under the wheels of a tractor. I twisted round in my seat, saw Lucy’s shoulders, hunched high and stiff. She’d been on the tractor six months now, and her dainty little hands were skilful on the wheel. She’d been a kennelmaid before the war, and I knew she missed the hounds now that the hunt was closed. She would be a kennelmaid again, she hoped, when the world dropped back in kilter. I knew about these feelings and hopes of hers because George Horne, her father, had told Selwyn of them, in the course of general conversation, and Selwyn had told me. That was how I learned Lucy’s news, these days. I wondered, now that the ice had been broken in such a spectacular fashion, what this invitation would lead to.

  She parked neatly on the triangle of grass at the end of the street. I clambered off the machine and jumped Pamela down. She stumbled against me as she landed. We walked the hundred yards up to the Hornes’ cottage.

  ‘We took three of ’em,’ Lucy said, as we went up the street, and I knew she meant refugees from Southampton.

  ‘Wherever did you put them?’

  ‘On the parlour floor.’ In the old days she’d have said, Yes, Ellen, ain’t it amazing. Being that our house is no more than a bloomin hovel. But I felt more sharply rebuked by this measured, adult response.

  Pamela tugged at my hand. ‘I want to do a wee-wee.’ We hurried the last few yards. Lucy’s cottage was set high above the road, up a flight of steps, and the privy was at the end of the garden.

  ‘Why do we have to go in this box?’

  Lucy suddenly smiled. ‘It’s the lav, dear.’

  ‘Look, it’s got a heart in the door.’ It did, a heart-shaped hole cut out of two planks. They had cut half a heart out of each plank and then matched them. I’d known this privy for ten years and never noticed before how exactly the two halves fitted. Lucy went indoors and I led Pamela into the lavatory.

  ‘Do I just wee-wee into the hole?’

  I found myself laughing. ‘Yes.’

  Her face darkened. ‘Mummy hasn’t gone to Heaven anyway. She said, “Pamela, I’ll always tell you where I’m going.” And she didn’t say anything about that.’ Her eyes wandered upward, caught in the shaft of light from the cut-out heart, looking for a solution. ‘Anyway,’ she continued, ‘even if she has gone to Heaven, she won’t be long. That’s the other thing she always says. “Won’t be long, Pammie.”’

  She shut her eyes and pressed her lips together.

  I washed my hands and Pamela’s at the kitchen sink. Lucy handed Pamela a slice of bread and butter. The food stemmed her tears but they began to flow again the moment she swallowed the last bite. Soundless this time. ‘Come, Pamela.’ I opened my arms. ‘Sit on my lap.’

  But she didn’t move. Instead she addressed Lucy, jerking her head at me. ‘She’s a horrible lady.’

  ‘We won’t mind her,’ Lucy said steadily, looking all the while at Pamela. ‘Now, do you know what a tortoise is?’ Pamela nodded, tears dripping from her chin. ‘There’s one in the shed. He’s in a hay box. We can go and take a peek if you like, but we can’t disturb him. It’s not a normal sleep, you see.’

  They went out into the garden. I remained sitting, suddenly too tired to move. Lucy came back in. ‘She’s havin a bit of a scramble on the apple tree. Not a tear. They turn on and off like a tap, that age.’

  How did people know these things?

  ‘How come you’ve still got her?’ Lucy went on. ‘Where’s her mam?’

  ‘Dead.’ I took a deep breath. ‘Dead in the Crown Hotel.’ I told Lucy about the stampede for escape, the well-meaning women. ‘Her mother never made it to Upton. I’ve only just told her.’

  Lucy whistled. ‘Blimey.’ She went again to the back door, and I stirred myself and followed her. We both peered out at Pamela. She was jumping, quite unperturbed, onto and off the apple tree’s ancient trunk which bowed like a camel almost to the ground.

  ‘I don’t think she believes it yet,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, the poor mite. Oh, lord.’ Lucy gave a sad little chuckle. ‘Explains why she don’t like you. I didn’t much take to the woman who told me my ma was dead. Old boiler of a night nurse.’ She pursed her lips into an O. ‘“I have some very grave noos for yoo, Miss Horne.”’

  The hooting tone made me laugh in spite of myself. ‘She didn’t talk like that!’

  ‘She did.’

  We went back to the kitchen and Lucy cut us some bread. She laid the slices on a familiar plate, the edge decorated with pansies which years of scrubbing had worn half away to leave the odd, faded, windblown petal and glint of gilt on the stems. Years ago I had eaten a pie off that plate, and even now it was the most delicious thing I had ever tasted.

  We ate now, Lucy breathing noisily, her eyes fixed on the table. No remark, no smile came my way. Finally I took my courage in my hands.

  ‘What’s wrong, Lucy? What have I done? Please tell me.’

  Outside in the garden Pamela chirped like a blackbird in spring. A child used to her own company.

  ‘You’ve been forgetful,’ she said at last. ‘Forgetful of your friends.’

  My mouth fell open. ‘When did I forget you? You were my bridesmaid!’

  ‘Yep, and you dropped me straight afterwards. Didn’t call by, didn’t chat. Months and months. So I assumed –’ she leaned on the word, using my voice to do so ‘– I assumed that it was my pay-off, the bridesmaid job, and Mrs Parr didn’t want anything more to do with poor little Miss Horne and her chest –’ she coughed theatrically ‘– and her teeth and all.’

  Lucy was missing six teeth, many at the front. The teeth were long gone and her gaps were familiar to her friends but all the same she pulled her top lip down to smile, to speak to strangers. And she had coughed every day of her life.

  ‘I invited you to our garden party. You didn’t reply.’

  ‘Oh, yes. Your garden party.’

  She spoke softly, as if to a silly child. I studied my clasped hands in sadness and shame. The invitation had been written on a card: Mr and Mrs Selwyn Parr, At Home. I hadn’t even popped my head round her door to ask her in person. Merely summoned her to mill about on my lawn with tea and cake, as if she were any one of my acquaintances instead of my oldest friend.

  ‘Mrs Parr was happy,’ I said after a while. ‘She wasn’t used to that. It made her clumsy.’ I looked up at her. ‘Lucy, please come and see us. We can bake you a potato, and you can share our parsnip stew. It won’t be as nice as yours, because I can’t cook like your nan. But we’ll
spare no effort.’

  She licked her finger and dabbed at the crumbs on the plate, gathering them up. I did the same thing at home after the children had finished. When she spoke her voice was gruff.

  ‘They do say you must forgive newly-weds. Their minds run on one thing. Though in your case it was Greek poems, like as not.’

  ‘Yes, it was. The Iliad. He was teaching me Greek.’

  She burst into a cackle. ‘You pair!’

  I laughed too. ‘It was fun. We’ve got no time for lessons now, of course.’

  ‘How’s it been, Ellen? What you expected?’

  A mariage blanc, Lady Brock had said. Have you heard the expression, my dear?

  The sheets of our marriage bed unfurled, heavy white linen. Is it the French for white wedding, Lady Brock?

  No, my dear, it is not.

  Lucy was gazing at me. How dark her eyes were. In the gloom of the kitchen I could hardly distinguish iris from pupil.

  ‘It’s been exactly as I expected,’ I said after a moment. ‘And I’ve honestly never been more content, Lucy.’

  Pamela was still on the apple tree. The bark was fissured and slippery with moss but she was sure-footed, turning on her toe at the end of each pass. As she walked she raised a scolding finger. ‘No, no, you’re naughty donkeys.’ Her voice carried in the still air. So clear. She would sing well. Selwyn could teach her. She saw me and jumped down immediately, ran to me with her arms open, collided with my midriff. I clung to her and she to me, her arms bound around my waist, her head pillowed on my belly, all her animosity gone. The door creaked and Lucy appeared on the step, her face sallow in the low light. Pamela continued to cling. ‘Ellen,’ she said. ‘Ell.’

  ‘Did the tortoise wake up?’ Lucy called. Pamela buried her face in my skirt.

  ‘Pamela, answer Lucy.’

  Pamela turned her head. ‘No, he didn’t, Lucy-Lou.’ She broke away from me and took Lucy’s hand. ‘Come on, Lou and Ell. Come and see my donkeys. They’re all tied up by the tree trunk.’ Together we went to the apple tree, Lucy and I, with Pamela between us. We pretended to admire the donkeys. There were a great many of them, all with complicated, mutable names. Pamela became lost, happily, in her naming.