Listen to the Moon

  Evening came down, and became night, a long, long night of cold and fear. The cold gripped me, froze me. The sea lapped and rocked us gently, and the piano murmured, lulling us. The moon hung above, riding the stars, hiding sometimes behind the clouds, following us, I thought, like a guardian angel. I hummed to it, hummed to Papa as I had promised.

  I listened to the moon, listened for him, and heard him, echoing our tune. He was alive, and I was alive. Uncle Mac and Aunty Ducka were alive. Thinking of Aunty Ducka made me smile, when there was so little to smile about. Hadn’t I promised her I would keep my feet dry? Another promise broken then.

  I heard Papa’s voice ticking me off, “Nincompoop, ninny,” he was saying. “Who’s been a silly nincompoop then?”

  Then he was reading to me, my favourite story again, The Ugly Duckling. Mama and Papa and Aunty Ducka had read it to me so often that I knew it almost by heart. I drifted off to sleep, listening to Papa, listening to Mama, listening to Aunty Ducka, as I so often had at home.

  “Night night, Merry,” Mama was saying. “Night night.” She was kissing my forehead, tucking me in.

  When the moon became the sun, the brightness of it woke me, and only then did I realise I must have been asleep. A bird, a white bird, was perched on the edge of the piano, eyeing me with a beady orange eye. I was so happy to have some company, so glad we were not alone. Another one flew down out of the sun and landed just for a moment beside it, before both lifted off, shrieking. “Gulls,” I told Celia. “Look, you see them? They have found us!”

  But Celia did not answer. It took me some moments to comprehend that I was not holding her any more. It was her teddy bear I was holding. Celia was not there, nowhere, gone. In the night sometime I must have let her go, or she must have let me go. I hoped it was her who had let me go. I have hoped that ever since. All I knew was that she had rolled away and gone down into the sea with Mama and Brendan and Maurice, with all the others from the ship, down into the sea where I knew that I too would soon be going. I was sad that I was alone, and suddenly angry, angry with everything and everyone, angry at the world, angry at myself.

  Maybe it was anger that gave me strength. I do not know. But suddenly I was up on my feet, and shouting, raging against myself for falling asleep, for losing Celia. I wanted it all to be over now, quickly. I would sink the piano myself, drown myself, get it over and done with. I jumped up and down, but it had no effect at all, except, I discovered, that I could make the piano murmur more, make it hum louder under my feet. I leapt up high to land all the more heavily. I danced, I pranced, I trotted and galloped, laughing now through tears of rage, wild with laughter, hysterical with it. Higher, higher I leapt. I stomped, I stamped. But nothing I could do would make the piano sink.

  I ran to the edge and stood there, looking down into the sea. I told myself out loud that all I had to do was to dive in, to jump in. “It’s easy, Merry. Do it. Just do it!” But I couldn’t. I wasn’t frightened, it wasn’t that. It was that old lady’s voice in my head, the one who had made sure I got into the lifeboat. “Live, child,” she had told me. “You have to live.” She too was down there at the bottom of the sea, with Mama and the others. They were all telling me to live. Celia was too. I heard her, heard her telling me to look after her teddy bear for her. I heard all of them. I made my way back to the middle of the piano, and sat down cross-legged, holding Celia’s teddy bear tightly to me. “We’re going to live,” I told him. “You and me, we’re going to live.” The bear was smiling, still smiling. He believed me, and if he believed me then I would believe me too. I would live.

  After that, I never lay down, not once. I knew if I did I should be bound to fall asleep again, that I would be bound to roll over the side and into the sea before I could save myself. I would sit where I was, not move, stay awake, and live.

  I honestly believe that, had it not been for those two inquisitive gulls, I should not have survived. They were not always there on the piano with me, but they returned often enough and stayed long enough to keep my hopes alive. If they had found me, I reasoned, then searchers could too. It was the last reasoning I can remember. I must have been much weakened, I suppose, by thirst, by hunger and cold.

  It seemed to me that I was existing now in a kind of limbo, in and out of a world of dreams and reality, unable any more to distinguish the one from the other, not caring about anything at all, except for Celia’s teddy bear and my two birds. Sometimes the birds were gulls, and sometimes they became peacocks, and I’d see Mama lying there face down in the sea, one of the peacocks on her back, spreading his tail feathers, lifting his head and shrieking. And then it was me shrieking, not the peacock, and the gulls were back there again on the piano and staring at me silently. I tried to talk to them, to Celia’s teddy bear, but no words would come any more.

  In those hours sitting on the piano in the midst of the ocean, I had lost all sense of time, of who I was, where I had come from, or how it was that I found myself sitting cross-legged on a piano in the middle of the ocean, with nothing but a smiling teddy bear and a couple of gulls for company. I was not surprised therefore – for there is nothing much in a dream that is surprising – when the surface of the sea nearby seemed suddenly to bubble and froth, and there rose from the ocean, no more than a stone’s throw away, a strange apparition. I could make no sense of what it was.

  I thought at first it might be a whale that was coming to investigate me, and I remembered thinking it must be as puzzled as I was to find a piano in the sea. Like most whales, it was shaped like a giant cucumber, growing in length and size with every moment as it broke the surface. Waterfalls poured in sheets down the shining sides as it emerged slowly but inexorably from the sea, the waves from the wash of it rocking the piano and tipping it ever more violently. Thinking it would sink now at any moment, I threw myself face down, clinging on tight to the teddy bear that had become more important to me than life itself, trying to brace myself with my toes to slow down my inevitable slide into the sea.

  The piano, though, righted itself just in time, and I lay there, perilously close now to the edge of it, to the surging ocean that wanted to suck me down and drown me. I looked up, and realised that this was no whale, but a ship, the like of which I had never seen before. Whales did not have engines, were not made of steel, did not have numbers on their sides. I could hear the rumble and roaring of engines beneath the sea, and then the rough voices of shouting men. Half a dozen of them were emerging from the vessel now, carrying a small boat between them. They were lowering it into the sea and rowing hard towards me. When they reached the piano, one of them got out of the rowing boat and stepped across gingerly on to the piano. He was on his hands and knees then, and crawling towards me.

  Crouching close now, and holding out his hands to me, he said: “Ist gut. Freund. Friend. Kommen sie mit. Komm.” I shrank away from him. “Gnädige Fräulein. You come, ja? Mit mir, in das Boot. Komm. Bitte. Komm.” He was a kind man. I could hear that in his voice, see it in his eyes. He would not harm me. “Ich heisse Wilhelm. Your name, young lady, ihre Name?”

  I understood, but I could not answer, because I did not know my name. I tried to speak. I wanted to tell him that I did not know, that I could not remember my name, that I could not remember anything. I tried again and again to speak, to tell him I could not remember. But, when I opened my mouth to talk, no words would come out.

  AFTER DR CROW’S LAST VISIT, the family should have been warned. They knew there would be trouble. They knew how some people might be. But nothing the doctor had said, nothing they might have imagined, could possibly have prepared the family for the resentment and anger the news seemed to have aroused, not just on Bryher, but all around the islands. Lucy Lost was German. ‘Wilhelm’, the name on the blanket she had been found with, was all the evidence they needed. Lucy Lost was a lousy Hun.

  The Wheatcroft family of Bryher, hitherto much liked and respected, had almost overnight become nothing but ‘Fritz lovers’, and some hinted darkl
y they could even be spies too. They found themselves shunned wherever they went. Many of Jim’s fishermen friends, until then his pals of a lifetime, would look the other way when they saw him coming and leave him to mend his nets down on the beach by himself. There were no more jolly quips about mermaids, no more talk about where was good to catch mackerel or pollock that day, no more friendly advice about when or how the weather might change. No words were spoken. None were needed. The averted eyes, the dark accusing looks, the whispered asides, were enough.

  In church on Sundays, no one would sit down in the same pew with them; and the Reverend Morrison himself, already for some time a fierce opponent of Mary’s outspoken pacifism, did what everyone else was doing, and ostracised them completely. His sermons were pointedly more belligerent than ever. He lost no opportunity to remind everyone of the barbaric atrocities committed by the German enemy, the bayoneting of little children in brave little Belgium, and the shameful torpedoing of the Lusitania, not a warship, not carrying a single heavy gun, not even a single rifle, but a passenger liner, travelling the ocean in peace. More than a thousand souls had been lost – an event which, he said, “had horrified and outraged, not just ourselves on these islands, but the entire civilised world. Always remember, we are fighting for God and our country, against the forces of evil. Did not the Angel appear to our troops at Mons? Is not God on our side, on the side of freedom and right?”

  No one came to the door to buy Mary’s eggs any more. No one came to call at all. And out around the island, everyone she met simply turned their back on her, and pretended she was not there. Doors remained closed if ever she called on anyone. No one stopped for a friendly chat; no one so much as greeted her. There was sullen hostility wherever she went.

  For Alfie and Lucy at school there was no such reticence. Hailed and celebrated only recently as school heroes, they were now despised, vilified and mocked at every opportunity. Lucy was utterly bewildered by all this sudden animosity, and shadowed Alfie even more closely than usual on the way to and from school, and whenever she could in the schoolyard.

  Only in Miss Nightingale’s classroom was there at least some sanctuary for her. Miss Nightingale did all she could to protect her and reassure her. To her, all this talk, all this rumour-mongering, was nothing but vicious, wicked and cruel. Like all the little children in her class, she did not care, one way or another, whether Lucy was German or not. For Miss Nightingale, Lucy Lost was simply sad and troubled, traumatised even, who, despite her considerable learning difficulties, was clearly a child of great gifts, in her piano playing, in her drawing too, a pupil who needed her help and support, and all the comfort and love she could give her. And for the children in her Infant class, Lucy was still their adored ‘little mother’, who played with them and cared for them, and whom everyone wanted for a best friend. In the days and weeks that followed the revelation about her ‘German’ blanket, that classroom proved to be the only haven at school for Lucy Lost.

  But for Alfie there was no hiding place. Alfie’s class, led by Zebediah Bishop and his friends, were for ever ganging up against him, taunting and insulting him endlessly about his “mad” family, his “loony” Uncle Billy who thought he was a pirate, and now his “loopy Fritz” sister, who was “so dumb she don’t even speak, and don’t even know who she is”, but who was probably the daughter of the filthy old Kaiser himself. Alfie did try all he could to turn a blind eye, turn a deaf ear, but sooner or later he would find himself drawn into yet another fight. Win or lose, if he was caught fighting, as he very often was, he would be dragged off by Beastly Beagley for punishment. He expected the ruler or the cane, and was always relieved, and a little surprised too, when it didn’t happen. Instead, he would spend almost every playtime these days in detention, which meant that Lucy would be left on her own outside in the schoolyard and unprotected.

  But he need not have worried. He’d see her, through the window, surrounded always by a protective gaggle of her little friends. He could hear the cruel jibes and hateful jeering, all directed at her noisily from across the schoolyard, but it seemed to him that she stayed serenely oblivious to all this hostility. Maybe she could not understand what they were saying, or maybe she was just being brave. To Alfie, it didn’t matter, he simply admired her more and more.

  Once, though, he saw Zeb and his bully-boy cronies circling her like wolves, moving in on her, with menace and malice in their eyes. They frightened off the infants, and chased them away, leaving Lucy to face them alone. Even then, she did not run, did not back away. He was about to dash out to help her when Miss Nightingale appeared and saved the situation. She came out into the schoolyard, and called Lucy indoors. Soon afterwards, he heard Lucy playing the piano – it had to be her because he recognised her favourite piece, the one she played most often on the gramophone back at home. There was defiance in the way she played that music. She was, he was sure of it, letting them all know out there in the schoolyard that she was not afraid, not allowing Zeb and his crowd to have the last word. The sound of her playing gave him all the strength he knew he would need to face down Zebediah Bishop and his gang when detention was over, or Beastly Beagley or anyone else, come to that.

  Miss Nightingale was fast becoming their only friend and ally at school. She was clearly taking every opportunity to call in Lucy from the schoolyard for as many piano lessons or extra writing lessons as possible. She was protecting her all she could. And, after school was over, she made a point of escorting both of them down to the quay on Tresco to catch the school boat back to Bryher. She guessed, and she was often right, that their tormentors might be lying in wait to ambush them on the way, but that they would never dare do anything with her there. She would stay with the two of them till the school boat came, then wave them off. But after that they were on their own. Every day she’d stand there, watching, helpless now to do any more, as the two of them sat side by side in the boat, apart from the others, staring ahead, enduring as best they could all the barbed remarks, the caustic banter, the crude gestures.

  But, even as she watched, Miss Nightingale could not find it in her heart to condemn Zeb and the others for their cruelty towards Alfie and Lucy Lost. This, she knew, was not their fault. It was plain to Miss Nightingale that Mr Beagley was responsible for all this. Day after day, Mr Beagley was quite deliberately whipping up a storm of war hysteria in the school. At the raising of the flag at the beginning of each day, after the singing of ‘God Save the King’, he would rant and rave about the barbarity of German troops. He’d tell story after story, dreadful stories some of them too, of the summary executions of women and children, of the sinking of our ships, and of the Lusitania in particular. He raged against the wickedness of the enemy, and warned against the spies and enemies in our midst, looking hard at Lucy, and at Alfie too, all the time, as he did so.

  Miss Nightingale could also see well enough that it was Alfie Mr Beagley was victimising, as much if not more than Lucy. And she knew why he was doing it too. Mr Beagley could never abide any defiance to his authority, even if it was only in a look – “dumb insolence”, he called it. The children had always to be fearful of him, to cower down before him, to show their obedience to his every whim. Even as a little boy, Alfie had never gone along with this. He’d been a thorn in Mr Beagley’s side ever since he arrived in school, and had as a consequence appeared in the punishment list in the school log as much as anyone. From the very first day that he had brought Lucy into school, he had always stood up for her and defended her, facing down Mr Beagley again and again.

  Miss Nightingale relished the moments when Alfie had spoken his mind to Mr Beagley, but she could see how this had unnerved and unsettled him, which of course made him even more vindictive and vicious than usual. He was a tyrant to the children, and to her. She always loved to see such a tyrant tremble. It gave her great delight and satisfaction. In her darkest hours, whenever she thought of leaving the school – and this was often – it was the well-being of the children she kept fo
remost in her mind, that stopped her, and most recently the well-being of Alfie and Lucy Lost. She would stay for them, and protect them all she could.

  At home both Mary and Jim were becoming ever more aware of how severely the children were being treated at school, by the other children, as well as by Mr Beagley himself. From the way they were themselves being ostracised, it wasn’t hard to imagine what the children must be going through every day. Alfie did not tell them everything, but they could see the bruises on his face, when he came home, and the torn collars. Both of the children were looking more pale and drawn every day.

  Jim threatened time and again to go over to the schoolhouse on Tresco and give Mr Beagley another piece of his mind. This time he wouldn’t pull his punches, he told Mary, this time he would make it stop. But Mary argued that whatever was done should be done peaceably. She decided to appeal directly to the Reverend Morrison, to ask him to intercede on their behalf with Mr Beagley – after all, he was the governor at the school, and a man of God. If anyone could and should stop this kind of victimisation, it would surely be him. Quite aware of how he regarded her, and what sort of a man he was, she did not hold out much hope. But she had to try.

  When she went to see the Reverend Morrison though, he wouldn’t even let her in at the door. Instead, he harangued her on the doorstep. “Mr Beagley runs a fine school, Mrs Wheatcroft. Before that girl came along there was no trouble. I told you at the time you should never have taken her in, but you wouldn’t listen. That is the problem with you, Mrs Wheatcroft: you don’t listen to your elders and betters. You were always like that over your support for the suffragettes, I seem to remember. You don’t appear to care what the good people of these islands think, just as you didn’t when you stood up in church that time last summer only days after the war started, and interrupted my sermon, to preach your pacifist views. You were the only one who spoke up against the war in the whole island, and now, when you welcome a child of the enemy into your house and people don’t like it, you come to me for help. You should learn, Mrs Wheatcroft, that as the good book says: ‘Ye reap what ye sow’.” And with that he slammed the door in her face.