Her words broke the dream world in which Mark had been living; he might be royal at that particular moment, but he was not so far away in his imagination that he could not shoot back to cling on to his bearskin. He grinned at Miss Jay.
“From this minute I’m a bear, a very quiet bear, skating very softly, so softly you won’t hear me go.”
The other big success of the matinée was Miriam. Her dancing absolutely charmed the audience, who shouted for her when the ballet finished. Winifred watched her and there were tears in her eyes.
“What extraordinary fortune! You would think that a school that had produced Posy Fossil would not get the same luck twice.”
Winifred had spoken her thoughts out loud. Sorrel thought she was speaking to her.
“But they had you, too.”
“Me, Sorrel! You’re only a beginner, but can’t you see that something about Miriam’s work that makes it quite different from what people like myself do, quite different, in fact, from what one dancer in every million does. Of course, it’s too early to be sure yet, but I think she’s got that something that’ll set her quite apart.”
It was most disheartening how ordinary everything became the second the matinée was over. The dressing-rooms were inspected to see they were perfectly tidy for the real actors who would use them that night, and then Sorrel and Mark and Holly were walking to the Underground with Hannah and Alice. Three ordinary children whom nobody could see had been a leading lady, a big singing success and a Polar bear, or worn such elegance as a buttercup dress only a short while before. Sorrel said:
“Nobody would think, looking at us, what an exciting afternoon we’ve had.”
Hannah had been rather proud really, but she was not going to say so.
“I should hope not. You look like three children who might be going to tea at a vicarage, and very proper, too.”
“But the afternoon’s not over yet, Sorrel,” Alice said. “You and me are going round by the Academy to fetch some letters.”
In a minute the world stopped looking grey, flat and dull, and was as gay as a chalk butterfly. Sorrel skipped with excitement.
“My letter from Pauline Fossil! Isn’t it super it turned up just this afternoon!”
Sorrel could not wait to get home to read her letter. She and Alice read it in the Underground.
DEAR SORREL,
This is difficult to write because it’s odd writing to somebody you’ve never seen. I shall find it much easier when I’ve had an answer from you. I am very glad that Madame has given you my scholarship, and I hope it will be useful to you. My two sisters and I had a great deal of help from all sorts of people when we were your ages, and that’s why Posy and I thought it would be most awfully nice if we could give some help back. We have felt rather out of things here, everybody in England has been working so hard, and had such a bad time with the bombing that my guardian (Garnie we call her) and I have often wished we could come back ourselves and do something strenuous, but we can’t. Luckily, my sister in England, Petrova, is doing so very well that perhaps it makes up a little for what Posy and I aren’t doing. It seems so idiotic just to make films when Petrova is flying planes, but even if I came home I wouldn’t be able to fly a plane, I never was mechanically minded. Garnie says I am more useful doing what I do best, and entertainment is badly needed.
Madame has told me about Mark, and I have written by this mail to Petrova and told her about him, as I think she would like to give him a scholarship in the way that Posy and I have to you and Holly. I expect Mark will be hearing from her. Tell him not to mind if she doesn’t say much, she’s very busy, and anyway, she never was a person who expressed herself much. She lives in a cottage near where she flies, with Gum (our great-uncle Matthew). Gum used to collect fossils but he can’t now and, instead, he collects babies; we were the first three. Now he runs a whole wartime nursery of them, and loves it.
When you answer this, will you tell me exactly how Madame looks and how the school is run now. I hear you do lessons there as well as stage training. We never did in my day and I can’t imagine it somehow. Do you still wear black overalls and white practice dresses for ballet? I hope they’ve changed the design of rompers for tap, we always hated those. I am sending over some money for you to buy yourself a Christmas present. I know you are not allowed to write to America to ask for anything you want or I would have tried to find out and send to you from here, which would have been much easier, but Posy and I think it’ll be nicer for you to have the money and buy things for yourselves. We were always wanting things so dreadfully when we were your ages, and we never had the money to buy them, and I daresay you’re the same.
Please give Winifred the most enormous hug and tell her not to go and see my newest film called “Look Up and Laugh.” It’s all about entertaining soldiers, and I was made to do a song and a dance, and it so reminded me of the first audition I ever went to, and how she said to me, “You were out of tune in the song, and your ankle shook awfully in the arabesque.” Please remember me affectionately (and respectfully) to Miss Jay and Madame Moulin. I have written to Madame by this post. Please write soon.
Yours affectionately,
PAULINE.
Posy’s letter was in such a sprawling, difficult handwriting that Alice read it to Holly:
MY DEAR HOLLY,
I’ve heard from Madame that she’s given you my scholarship. She says she is not sure whether you are going to dance in the way I meant, so I have written to her and said to give you a scholarship anyway, and find another dancer for me, as that is what I really want. I am not liking it here. Ballet is most unsatisfactory on the screen. It is all right during the shooting and much of the choreography is lovely, especially as in my last picture, which Manoff directed; but when you see it, it goes too fast, the space is too small, and much of the footwork gets blurred. Garnie and Pauline say it’s a very good thing I have a contract because it will mean I can have some money for afterwards when Manoff starts his ballet. I am to be one of his prima ballerinas. We’ve planned to do some beautiful things, and he will collect many of his old company. I think it’s bound to be a success; but Pauline, Garnie and Nana say they think it will be that kind of success when it will be a very good thing to have money behind you.
Have you been to see the Sadler’s Wells ballet? If not, please do, and write to me all about it. If my contract was finished I would have liked to have come over and danced with them, but it would be difficult to get a passage, and Nana (our nurse who was with me in Czechoslovakia) says she won’t cross the ocean again in this war and nobody will let me go alone, so it’s no good my writing to Ninette de Valois, which I should like to have done just in case. Madame tells me that Margot Fonteyn’s work gets more beautiful each season. She’s very lucky to have the opportunities that she has and I’m very jealous of her. I’m sick of being in pictures, it’s a stupid life. There’s just one comfort, they wouldn’t let me use my name; they call me Posina, which is pretty frightful; but it’s a secret, so don’t tell anybody. They thought it was better to leave Pauline the only one with the name Fossil. I am very glad about this because, when the war’s over, I mean the name Posy Fossil to be known by everybody who loves dancing, and that certainly won’t happen now with the sort of pictures I dance in. I have sent over two pounds for you to have a Christmas present. Nana says you’d better spend it on woollies because she always thought the Academy cold; but, of course, you won’t. I’m only telling you because she asked me to. Please give all my love to everybody in the Academy that I know, and tell Madame that every day, no matter what happens, I do her six special exercises, and I have worked out a message which my feet say to her every day.
With love,
POSY.
X X X X X
CHAPTER XIII
CHRISTMAS DAY
Christmas Day in every family is built up on little bits of custom. Something happens one year and it is amusing and gay and Christmassy, and so it becomes part of all futur
e Christmases. Christmas Day in Guernsey had been full of things like that. The children’s father had come into their nursery for the opening of their stockings and there were always band instruments in each stocking, and when the stocking opening was finished they played “Good King Wenceslas” with their father singing the solo part of the King and Mark singing the page, and a lot of repeat verses for the band only. There had been visits to friends after morning church and a lovely party with a Christmas tree in somebody else’s house in the afternoon.
When the children came to live with Grandfather, Hannah did the best she could with Christmas. She managed the band instruments in the stockings and she tried to sing “Good King Wenceslas.” This was lucky, because that first Christmas of the war with their father away had felt a bit queer and miserable, but Hannah singing the King’s part in “Good King Wenceslas” was so funny that they all laughed until they felt sick. As Hannah could not sing “Good King Wenceslas,” they made her sing “The First Noel” as a solo, with the children helping in the Noel bits; and this, having happened for three Christmases, was now an established custom. There were other things that had happened in the vicarage on Christmas Day that had become customs. There was a party in the afternoon in the house of a big family where there was a Christmas tree, and charades were played, and Christmas Day had finished with a special supper of scrambled eggs made by themselves, eaten in the kitchen with Hannah.
This year Christmas was going obviously to be quite different from anything the children had known before. They were keeping, of course, a few of their own customs, but mostly they were going to be part of Grandmother’s. Christmas Day was the day when she received her family. She had them all to dinner in the evening. It made the day exciting in a way to be going to meet Aunt Lindsey and Uncle Mose and Uncle Francis and Aunt Marguerite, and to be going to see Miranda and Miriam away from the Academy.
“Proper set-up it is,” said Alice. “I’m worn to a shred by the time I’ve laid the Cain and Abel, and when it comes to dishing up I never know how to drag my plates of meat up the apples and pears. This year it won’t half be a set-up. We’re receiving in style. We’ve got a part. We’re on top of the world. We shan’t half see that we’re number one at our own party.”
Because of the Fossil scholarships, Sorrel and Holly had a shilling pocket-money every week. This, divided into three, made eightpence each. They spent some of their eightpences on their month’s sweet ration, and they each gave a penny a week to the Red Cross; and there was, of course, a penny for the collection on Sundays, but what was over they had saved for Christmas presents. They could not buy much because there was nothing much that was cheap to buy; but they managed parcels all round. Sorrel had bought a party hair bow on a slide for Holly, and some pencils for Mark. For Alice there was a calendar with a picture of people about a hundred years ago drinking round an inn on a very snowy day; for Hannah there was also a calendar, but hers had a little wreath of holly and a verse that might have been part of a carol. Mark gave Sorrel and Holly some drawing-pins, which seemed a funny present, but was one of the few things he could afford to buy that was useful. For Hannah there was a little wooden ruler, and for Alice some tin-tacks. Holly had never been able to grasp how coupons worked. Up till almost Christmas Day she hoped to buy soap for everybody, because she liked the smell. When at last she realised that it made no difference what shop you went into they would all want soap coupons, it was Christmas Eve and the shops were nearly empty, so in desperation she bought buns, not even nice buns, but the sort you would expect to get when you queue up for them on Christmas Eve. For Grandmother the children had put their money together. They bought a white heath in a little pot. It was really a tiny plant and it cost a fearful lot, but it was the best they could manage; so that was that.
Christmas Day started in a proper way. There were the stockings and there was Hannah.
“Happy Christmas, dear,” she said to Sorrel. “Don’t you touch your stocking now, I’m just popping along to fetch Mark and Holly.”
Holly sat in bed beside Sorrel, and Mark sat the other end, and Hannah sat on the side of the bed. Of course, the stockings had not got in them the good things they used to have because things like that were not in the shops any more. But the fun of Christmas and stockings and presents is obviously not in what the presents are made of, for though the trumpets were cardboard instead of tin, and the drum was only paper and the triangle was very small, and the mouth organ only had four notes, it was all the funnier trying to be an orchestra with them.
Alice came as audience.
“Happy Christmas, everybody. I thought I better hear old Hannah sing her carol. I was afraid if I wasn’t here to shout to the neighbours we might have the police in.”
It was a very nice carol singing, and when Hannah got to the bit:
“They looked up and saw a Star
Shining in the East beyond them far.
And to the earth it gave great light,
And so it continued by day and by night,”
it was as much Christmas Day as ever it had been. Alice wiped her eyes.
“Christmas carols always make me cry, and that’s a fact.” She laid four little parcels on the bed. “You pay your money and you take your choice.”
How Alice had managed to save the sugar and get the treacle off the points, nobody knew and nobody asked; but there were four packets of toffee, home-made, brown and stiff. There were no sweets in the stockings this year and Christmas Day cannot be said properly to have begun without that sickish feeling that comes from eating sweets before breakfast; so the hat was, as it were, put on the day when they all had a piece of Alice’s toffee in their mouths.
Hannah’s church was very nicely decorated. There was not much holly, but the decorators had done very well with evergreens and red berries from other plants wired on to look like holly berries. In an alcove there was a beautiful crib, with stars shining through the back of the stable and the Virgin Mary sitting by the manger with the Baby on her knee, and two sheep and a donkey and four cows kneeling in the straw, looking reverent. The hymns met with everybody’s approval. They began with “Hark, the herald angels,” and they sang “While shepherds watched” during the collection, and “God rest you merry, gentlemen,” as they went out.
“Just what we might have had at home,” said Hannah. “I can’t praise higher.”
In the afternoon it was not a bad day, so the children went over to the Square garden; and there, on the grass, were two boys and a girl kicking about a football. Evidently, what the head gardener had said was true. Now that the chance of bombing was less, the children were beginning to come back. Holly and the smaller boy, whose name was Robert, went off to ride on his tricycle that he had been given that morning, and Sorrel and Mark played football with the other two children. They got very hot and the time passed extraordinarily quickly, and they were amazed when the nurse belonging to the other children came along and said it was nearly time for tea.
Sorrel did wish she had got something nice to wear. She had her school velvet, but it had been outgrown before Grandfather died, and she had been meant to have another as soon as the coupons would run to it. Although she did not seem to have grown very much, the frock seemed to fit her a great deal worse since she last wore it. She seemed to have got broader. It was difficult to get it to fasten at the back, and when it was fastened it made her feel short of breath. It had luckily got short sleeves, but they seemed disobliging and cut into her arms. It was not so terribly wrong in length, she had thin legs and a short frock did not matter. As well as fitting badly, it was shabby looking. It had thin places where there hardly seemed to be velvet any more, but only the stuff that velvet is made on, and it had lost its colour in places. It was meant to be green, but Sorrel noticed as she put it on that in quite a lot of spots it was much nearer grey. “If only this wasn’t the first time that the uncles and aunts are seeing me!” Sorrel thought. “They’re bound to expect rather a lot from Mother’s c
hild, and really, I do look pretty drab. I do hope Holly and Mark will make a better impression. It wouldn’t be so bad if only I could put my bad clothes down to the war; but Miranda and Miriam live in the war too, and I bet they look quite nice.”
Mark was looking ordinary except that he was unusually well brushed and clean. He wore his grey shorts, a white shirt and his school tie. Alice had said that she thought he should wear white socks and that Grandmother would expect it. Luckily, Mark had not heard this suggestion and Hannah treated it with scorn.
“I know what’s right for Mr. Bill’s children, and that’s how things are going to be.”
Holly looked rather nice. She was at the right age for party clothes, and with her curls she was the party-frock sort. She had, of course, got all the clothes Sorrel used to have and had now outgrown. She was wearing a white crêpe de Chine frock, and the little cherry-coloured bow that was Sorrel’s present in her hair. Hannah would not have said so for the world, but she was very proud of Holly when she had finished with her. Sorrel hoped when she came along for Alice to inspect her that perhaps she did not look as bad as she thought she did, but what Alice said was:
“Well, there’s a war on and you’re at least covered, and I suppose we mustn’t expect more.”
Which, the more you thought about it, the less encouraging it was.
To save heating and trouble, dinner was being served in one end of Grandmother’s drawing-room. The children thought when they were dressed they would go down, but Alice had given her instructions.
“Nobody takes a step till I fetches them. We are more fussy about Christmas Day than anybody would believe. All kinds of goings on we have. You’ll see.”
When the children were called down, Alice did not do what she usually did and announce them, but she led them into the drawing-room, which they found entirely empty. By the fire was an armchair with Grandmother’s green cushion in it. The sliding doors were closed. Alice, who was rushed because of cooking the dinner, gave Sorrel her instructions.