LV
‘The Frog wears pearls under her frock.’
‘The Frog won’t say who gave them to her, but she doesn’t say no when you ask if it’s her American.’
‘The Frog looks quite different. You don’t think...?’
‘I say, have you heard the buzz about The Frog?’
Laurel was not to blame. She had been tempted to display her pearls and pretend there was a romance behind them, but she had refrained. Uncle John would think it silly and cheap, which it was. She was working hard. She intended to get that matric exemption when she took her School Certificate. Uncle John and the Foxglove had talked a lot about what she might do when she left school. She was for once without ambition herself. She had a dim idea that she would like to take a domestic economy course. If ever again somebody like Uncle John needed looking after, it would be nice to know how to do all the things, cooking, laundry, all of it.
A bad name in a school is hard to live down. None of the staff believed in Laurel’s reformation. She seemed to be working better, but she would slide back. It was the games mistress who first heard the gossip. Her eyes bulging, she whispered it to a friend. The friend told Laurel’s form mistress. Finally, the news reached Miss Clegg.
Laurel was quite unaware that anything was wrong. She received the summons to Miss Clegg’s study without a quiver. So certain was she that for once she had done nothing to annoy anyone that she came in smiling. Her smile died at the sight of the look on Miss Clegg’s face.
‘I understand, Laurel, you are wearing a string of pearls.’
Laurel’s hand flew to her throat.
‘They don’t show. Please let me wear them. They mean an awful lot. ...’
‘Who gave them to you?’ There was silence. Miss Clegg repeated her question.
‘I can’t tell you. It’s a secret.’
‘I will tell you what I have heard. They’re a present from an American soldier. There is a very silly story going round the school.’ Laurel said nothing. It was pretty mean on Walter to let him be blamed, still, he would never know, and she was not going to tell old Clegg about Uncle John. Miss Clegg motioned her to a chair. ‘Sit down, Laurel. You’ve always been unsatisfactory. It’s hard work running a boarding-school these days, one depends on the co-operation of the elder girls, from you I’ve had none. You are a trouble maker, and now comes this unpleasant story. I’ve talked to the head and she is seeing you later. This incident, into which I shall not enquire further, happened in the holidays. It is, therefore, not a school concern; that a girl like yourself should be part of the school is our concern. We are writing to your mother asking her to remove you.’
Laurel gaped at Miss Clegg. What was she talking about? What silly story? Expelled! Mum was to be written to. She would have to take her back with her. It would be terrible, neither Mum nor Charles would want her. It was a secret about the necklace, but Uncle John would understand. She pulled out the pearls for Miss Clegg to see.
‘I never said they were given me by an American. Actually they were given me by my Uncle John. Aunt Lindsey’s husband. I was with them for the summer holidays.’
Laurel looked so earnest, and somehow, in spite of everything, so innocent, that Miss Clegg began to doubt. Could it be school gossip? She rang a bell.
‘I shall investigate this. In the meantime you will work and eat alone. You are to speak to nobody.’
LVI
Lindsey knew something was wrong. John had changed. He whistled and sang about the house. He did not seem to mind as he used to when she criticised or complained. He had slipped from her. He was away for a day and refused to say where he had been, or whom he had seen. She grew angry. She insisted it was her right to know where he went. Before this sick leave he would have cared. He would have apologised. Now he laughed. Then, suddenly, without a word, he packed a suitcase and left a message he would not be back for two or three days.
John was to Lindsey a possession. Her background required a husband, just as it required a suitable setting of house and staff. She had always guarded him jealously. He was hers. Now, who was he seeing? He had been so faithful, she knew most of his friends. There had been a moment when she had suspected Lena. That was unlikely now with Charles about. She could not work. She could not sleep. She ramped up and down the house and made Miss Grigson’s life hell.
The telephone call was for John. Lindsey took it.
‘Well, you’ll do just as well as a matter of fact. It’s Miss Clegg speaking. I’m head of the boarding side of Greenwood House. I have your niece with me. Laurel is wearing pearls which have caused rather silly talk. She says they were a present to her from her Uncle John. Is this correct?’
LVII
It was gloomy by yourself with no one allowed to speak to you. They sent over her work from the school. The prefect who brought it, and the maid who served her food, used the least possible words. ‘I feel like a prisoner in the Tower,’ thought Laurel. But she was not too depressed. Miss Clegg would write to Uncle John and that would be the end. What on earth had old Clegg got hold of? Even if Walter had given her the pearls it seemed a queer thing to expel you for.
Lindsey arrived about tea-time. She asked to see Laurel alone. She waited while Miss Clegg closed the door. Her face frightened Laurel. She had risen to her feet when Miss Clegg and her aunt came in, now she moved back, putting as much distance between herself and Lindsey as possible. Lindsey’s voice was controlled but harsh with anger.
‘Give me the pearls.’
Laurel laid a hand over them, she felt them pressing into her throat. They comforted her.
‘They’re mine. Uncle John gave them to me.’
‘You don’t deny it?’
‘No.’
‘What did he give you them for?’
‘Just a present.’
Lindsey’s skin seemed to tighten, there were red patches on her cheeks.
‘Aren’t you ashamed? Or perhaps you’re not as you’re your mother’s daughter. Don’t you know right from wrong? These picnics! Pretending you were an innocent schoolgirl! What exactly did you allow?’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘Rubbish! You’re sixteen and a half. Of course you know. You’re still meeting, aren’t you?’
‘You know I’m not. I’m here.’
Lindsey brushed that aside.
‘I must know how far this has gone.’
Laurel looked despairingly at Lindsey. What a flap she was in!
‘I don’t know what you mean.’
Lindsey’s control broke. This was intolerable. These pert answers, this wide-eyed innocent look. She came round the table and shook Laurel so violently that stars danced in front of the girl’s eyes and her ears sang.
‘You filthy little beast. Messing about with men at your age. Your own uncle. Serve you right if you have a baby.’
LVIII
For quite a while Laurel did not move, she stared at the door which Lindsey had slammed. Her brain cleared. She covered her mouth with both hands, her cheeks flamed. She whispered meaningless expressions. ‘Oh gosh!’ ‘Oh my goodness!’ Suddenly she knew she must get away. Somewhere Aunt Lindsey was telling the things she thought to Miss Clegg and the head. They would send for her. She must not be here. But where? Not Mum. She wouldn’t want her. Uncle John? That meant going to Aunt Lindsey’s house. Home? No, they would look there first.
The door was not locked. Laurel ran to her dormitory.
She snatched a coat and a beret. Her mind was on a problem. Money was locked up at school. Yet she must have money. If only she could get hold of Alice. Alice would help, but Alice was over at the school. Money. On Matron’s desk was a blue wooden collecting box. Matron’s brother was in the Navy. It was for Navy war libraries. Matron’s office was empty. Laurel found a piece of paper and a pencil. She wrote: ‘I have taken your box. I will let you know how much was in it, and you can get it back from Miss Clegg. LAUREL WILTSHIRE.’
XLIX
Foxglove had said she would be in at nine. It had never occurred to Laurel she would not hear her voice. That a brisk voice would say, ‘Any message?’ Almost Laurel put down the receiver. She was half crying but she managed to gulp. ‘Tell her it’s Laurel. I’m at King’s Cross. I haven’t enough money to ring again. Could she come. I’m in the station.’
A police constable saw a young girl hanging about. He watched her for some time. Then he came over to her.
‘Waiting for somebody?’
‘Yes.’
‘Who is it?’
‘A friend. She was my governess.’
‘Where’s she coming from?’
‘Scotland.’
‘On what train?’
‘I’m not sure.’
‘How old are you?’
‘Sixteen.’
A juvenile! Hanging about a station. The constable had daughters of his own, he spoke in an authoritative but fatherly way.
‘You come along with me.’
The hostel shone with cheap linoleum. On the walls were texts. They gave Laurel supper but she was too exhausted to eat. Presently she was taken up to an office and questioned. A call from the matron had brought round a police woman, who, since Laurel was a juvenile, was in plain clothes. To Matron Laurel had only admitted that she was sixteen and her name was Laurel. The police woman got a little more. She heard of the money borrowed from the money-box.
‘I left a note to explain. I’ve got enough to pay it back. It was an awful job to open the box. It was mostly pennies.
There was one pound twelve shillings and three-pence halfpenny.’
The policeman had reported to Matron that Laurel had been seen making a phone call. The police woman built on that. Who was the friend in Scotland?
It was kindness that wore Laurel down. They were not angry that she would not say from where she had run away. They did not press her when she said it would not be possible to get hold of her mother. There must be somebody she would like to see. She told them about Ruth, and gave them the telephone number.
Laurel was given a bath and lent a nightdress. She was in a small room with three other girls. It was a dreadful night. She could not sleep. Every time she dropped off she awoke with a start, shivering and crying. She would never be able to see Uncle John again. She was expelled from school. Would they keep her here for ever? In the dawn she lost faith even in Ruth. In the train she had seen her shining like a lamp in her darkness. She would hide her. She knew it was not true.
She was dozing when Matron shook her.
‘Get up, dear, and come down. There’s somebody to see you.’ Laurel’s first thought was Lindsey. Her eyes shone with terror.
‘I don’t want to see anybody.’
‘Oh yes, you do. Come along, dear.’
Laurel put on her coat. Her teeth chattered from nervous exhaustion. She followed Matron down to the office. There was a text on the wall, ‘Be not deceived. God is not mocked. Whatsoever a man soweth. That shall he reap.’ Sitting under it, spruce in spite of a horrible journey, was the Colonel. He got up and kissed Laurel. He was just as ordinary as if he were greeting her in his own hall.
‘Hallo, my dear. Go up and dress, will you. I have a car outside.’
‘Where are you taking me?’
‘To your home. I have telephoned nurse to have a good breakfast ready for us.’
LX
Laurel slept in the car, her head on the Colonel’s shoulder. They did not say much. What Aunt Lindsey had said it was not possible to repeat.
It was so easy in the house. Nannie and Stroch were waiting, Nannie pleased, Stroch hysterical, neither inquisitive.
After breakfast the Colonel packed Laurel off to bed and himself went to the telephone. He rang Greenwood House, Dot, Lindsey, Ruth, and, finally, he located Lena. He was tired, he had travelled all night. It was warm for October. He sat in the sun. His thoughts were of Alex. Lindsey had not said much to Miss Clegg and the headmistress, but she had backed their opinion that Laurel was unsatisfactory. She was to be expelled. Dot sounded weary. ‘That family! I had an awful time with Tony after Henry left. He’s such a surly, unco-operative boy. Tuesday’s a bundle of nerves.’ Lindsey had been short. She had a guilty conscience. John had written he wanted a divorce. Whether he got it or not he was not coming back. He did not say who it was he loved, except that she was in one of the Services. She said she was glad that tiresome girl had been found. The rest of the call was complaints about John. Lena said they had spent the night with Selina. She had signed a contract for Kim. He had been offered a wonderful boy’s part in a play. She would come down at once. It was all right. Charles would not be coming in any case, he was working. Ruth sent Laurel endless loving messages.
Mustard passed. The Colonel nodded.
‘’Mornin’.’
Mustard leant on his fork.
‘You brought Laurel down?’
‘Yes. She had a bad night. She’s resting. She’ll be about this afternoon.’
‘She stayin’?’
‘I hardly know. Her mother will be here soon.’
‘Have ’em all four this Christmas. Flying bombs have cleared up nicely.’
‘You bothered with the rockets?’
‘No, never seen they. Laurel’s a grown woman now. Nice if she could stop along. Make more of a home like for the others.’
Mustard was back at his work. The Colonel was almost dozing. Alex seemed close.
‘Somehow we’ve messed it. Not a bad idea that. Motherly little thing. Might let her have a try. Might send her back to that other school whatever it was called. She liked it there. It’s all this choppin’ and changing.’
Mrs. Oliver looked out of the window.
‘Aren’t you cold?’
The Colonel got up.
‘A little perhaps.’
‘News is good, isn’t it? Knew it would be. I read it would finish Christmas 1944 in my cards. Shockin’, though, the state France and that are in. Turns you over, don’t it, to think of the children? I was saying to my daughter only yesterday, “We got a lot to be thankful for in this country. Our kids ’aven’t suffered ’o-ever else ’as.”’
AFTERWORD
Noel Streatfeild is best known for her children’s books, especially Ballet Shoes, which has been continuously in print since its publication in 1936. Her first love was the theatre, and it was only in her early thirties when her career as an actress threatened to decline into mediocrity that she started, tentatively, and with much misspelling to write. Her first book The Whicharts (named almost blasphemously by this parson’s daughter from the Lord’s Prayer: ‘which art in heaven . . .’) was at once hailed by the critics, including John Galsworthy, as a brilliant new talent. By the time Saplings was published she had already had ten adult novels under her belt, all out of print and forgotten today.
A consummate craftswoman, Noel Streatfeild knew better than to preach to her readers, which is one reason why she was so successful as a children’s author. Yet Saplings is a novel with a powerful and deeply felt message, arriving, finally, in its last ironic lines, delivered in slightly stereotyped Dickensian cockney by the cleaning-lady, Mrs. Oliver: ‘We got a lot to be thankful for in this country. Our kids ’aven’t suffered ’o-ever else ’as.’
Saplings was first published in 1945. Streatfeild’s purpose is ominously clear from the start: she sets out to prove Mrs. Oliver wrong. She takes a happy, successful, middle-class pre-war English family (and the Wiltshires, like their name, are very English – there is no hint of the Celtic fringe or the cosmopolitan exoticism which lurks in the background of Ballet Shoes), ‘beautiful, orderly, full of children’ (the four ‘saplings’), with holidays at the seaside, a comfortable house in Regent’s Park, a glamorous mother and successful industrialist for a father, nannies and nurses, prep schools and public schools – and then tracks in miserable detail the disintegration and devastation which war brought to tens of thousands of such families.
 
; Streatfeild’s supreme gift was her ability to see the world from a child’s perspective. What makes Saplings special is her use of that skill to explore a very adult problem – the psychological impact of war and trauma on family life. Here she was and still is in tune with the zeitgeist. In the mid 1940s psychologists, psychoanalysts and child psychiatrists were just beginning to address the very same issues from a scientific perspective. Bowlby had just published his ground-breaking 44 Juvenile Thieves, showing how adolescent delinquency arises out of loss and separation in childhood. Maternal Care and Child Health, his influential W.H.O.-commissioned study of the impact of war on child mental health appeared only a few years later; and at the same time he was also starting to pioneer psychotherapy with whole families. Winnicott wrote and broadcasted about the inner world of the infant, and Melanie Klein and Anna Freud were developing child psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, the latter, with Dorothy Burlingham, running her nursery for orphans, most of whom were psychological casualties of war.
In the first half of the century children’s well-being was mainly equated with their physical health. Novelists, among whom Dickens is the obvious example, had long been interested in the working of children’s minds, and the impact of adult neglect and cruelty upon them, but science had lagged behind. Psychoanalysis – an area about which we have no evidence that Streatfeild took the slightest interest – had established two essential themes which nevertheless underlie the thrust of her book. First, that children’s minds were as vulnerable as their bodies to disturbance and illness, and second, and as a consequence of the first, that children are autonomous beings with their own needs and projects, and are not merely objects to be controlled and manipulated by adults, however well-meaning.
Evacuation was an obvious response to the threat of a war which for the first time in history directly targeted civilians, but the psychological consequences of separating children from their parents was glossed over in the rush to ensure their physical survival. War posed a terrible Hobson’s choice for families, and it was only afterwards that the toll it had taken in terms of depression and despair could begin to be recognised. Saplings is the literary equivalent of the psychological audit initiated by Bowlby and others. For Bowlby the Secure Base is the key to psychological survival, and the capacity of parents, families and nations as a whole to provide such a secure base is severely compromised at times of war. While psychological illness tends actually to decrease during active periods of conflict, the long-term effects on children are incalculable, a theme recently taken up by Pat Barker in relation to the First World War in her novel Another World.