Singing for Mrs Pettigrew: A Story Maker's Journey

  Sofia could not look any more. She sat down. The blood had congealed on her leg. She took off her sock. Her ankle was puffed up and grey.

  A window shattered somewhere in the village, then another, then another. Some way away, a gun began to chatter and did not stop.

  “Are you still in there?” It was the soldier’s voice from below her window.

  “Yes,” she replied at once, without thinking.

  “For God’s sake, don’t try to run. You’ll be seen. They’ll kill you if they see you. They mustn’t leave any witnesses.”

  “My mother, my nan. They were in the lorry. Where have you taken them? Where have they gone?”

  “You don’t want to know,” said the soldier. “Just worry about yourself. And don’t look out of the window. They’ll see you. I could see the shape of your head from across the square. Keep down. I can’t stay.” Sofia heard him walk away. She wanted to ask him so much more but could not risk calling out. She sat down on the toilet and tried to gather her thoughts, but nothing would come but tears. Racked with sobbing, Sofia put her head between her knees and hugged herself into a tight ball and closed her eyes. So she sat for hour after hour as they burned the village around her. Trying not to listen, not to smell.

  The first explosion was from far away, but all the same, it rocked the building, blasted her ears and left a ringing inside her head that would not stop. The next was closer, in the square itself, maybe the post office, she thought; and the next shortly afterwards was even closer still. Perhaps the café. She bit her lip till it bled, determined not to scream, not to give herself away. When plaster crashed down from the ceiling onto her shoulders, she could stand it no longer. She lifted her head and screamed and screamed. Through her own screaming, through the whistle in her ears, she heard the whoosh and crackle of the flames outside, the roar of the roofs collapsing, and always the soldiers whooping.

  Then she saw smoke drifting in under her door, thick smoke that would stifle the life out of her. She had to get away. She climbed up onto the seat and put her nose to the window to breathe in the last of the cleaner air. That was when the tanks began to fire from under the trees, pounding, pounding, pounding. She fell backwards onto the floor, back down into the smoke. She rolled into a corner, covering her face, her mouth, her ears, clenching herself into herself as tight as she would fit. Then she prayed. The picture she had seen on television of the child without any legs flashed into her head. “Please God, I want my legs. I need my legs. Let me die if you want, but I want my legs. I want my legs.”

  The smoke was thinning. Suddenly she could breathe without coughing, then there were voices outside.

  “The toilets. Don’t forget the toilets.” It was the cowboy soldier. “A grenade will do it.”

  “Hardly worth the trouble, Captain,” said another. Her soldier, her soldier’s voice. “It’s not as if there’s anyone left to piss in it, is there? And anyway, why don’t we leave it there as a monument. All that’s left of them, their toilet.”

  The cowboy soldier laughed. “Good. Very good. I like it. Some bonfire, eh?” They were walking away now. The cowboy soldier went on, “D’you see the mosque come down? Obstinate beggar, he was. Took twenty rounds to topple him. This heat gives a man a thirst, eh? Let’s get at the beer.”

  “Why not?” said Sofia’s soldier.

  There were no more shootings after that, no more explosions, but Sofia stayed where she was, curled up on the floor of the toilet. She could hear the soldiers carousing in the square and the sound of smashing beer bottles. One crashed against the window above her head, shattering the glass. Shortly after, their laughter was drowned out by the noise of the tank engines starting up. They were calling each other. They were going. She waited a few minutes more until she was quite sure the tanks were on the move, their engines revving. Then she climbed up and looked out. The two tanks were rumbling away out of sight, belching black smoke out behind them. They were gone.

  Everywhere she looked was utter destruction. The village was a flaming, smoking ruin. Like all the other buildings, the café had no roof. Flames licked out of the windows, leaping across the road into the trees. The parked cars were blackened shells now, the tyres still burning furiously. The front of the shop had entirely caved in. Sofia got down, opened the door and hobbled out into the square. The minaret had fallen right across School Lane, obliterating the houses beneath. Martha still lay outside her café but now her dog was beside her. He was not moving. Sofia sat down on the bench in the middle of the square where she was furthest from the heat of the fires. She had no tears left to cry.

  She was still sitting there late that evening when the reporters came in their Land Rover. She was rocking back and forth and there was a cow beside her, grazing the grass. She was humming “Raining in My Heart”. She looked up at them as they approached.

  “Hello,” she said. “That’s Myrtle. She’s come to find me. She wants milking.”

  “Is this your village?” asked a reporter, pushing a microphone at her. Sofia looked at him blankly. “What does it feel like to see it like this?” he went on. “And what do you think of the people who’ve done it? Where the hell is everyone, anyway?”

  “I’ve got my legs,” said Sofia, and she smiled. “I’ve got my legs. God is great.”

  half a man

  When I was very little, more than half a century ago now, I used to have nightmares. You don’t forget nightmares. The nightmare was always the same. It began with a face, a twisted, tortured face that screamed silently, a face without hair or eyebrows, a skull more than a face, a skull which was covered in puckered, scarred skin stretched over the cheekbones. It was Grandpa’s face and he was staring at me out of his scream. And always the face was on fire, flames licking out of his ears and mouth.

  I remember I always tried to force myself to wake up, so that I wouldn’t have to endure the rest of it. But I knew every time that the rest would follow however hard I tried to escape – that my nightmare would not release me, would not allow me to wake until the whole horrible tale had played itself out.

  I saw a great ship ablaze on the ocean. There were men on fire jumping overboard as she went down, then swimming in a sea where the water burned and boiled around them. I saw Grandpa swimming towards a lifeboat, but it was packed with sailors and there was no room for Grandpa. He begged them to let him on, but they wouldn’t. Behind him, the ship’s bow lifted out of the sea, and the whole ship groaned like a wounded beast in her death throes. Then she went down, slipping slowly under the waves, gasping great gouts of steam in the last of her agony. A silence came over the burning sea. Grandpa was clinging to the lifeboat now, his elbows hooked over the side. That was when I realized that I was in the lifeboat with the other sailors. He saw me looking down at him and reached out his hand for help. It was a hand with no fingers.

  I would wake up then, shaking in my terror and knowing even now that my nightmare was not over. For my nightmare would always seem to happen just a day or two before Grandpa came to stay. It was a visit I always dreaded. He didn’t come to see us in London very often, every couple of years at most, and usually at Christmas. Thinking about it now, I suppose this was part of the problem. There were perfectly good reasons why we didn’t and couldn’t see more of him. He lived far away, on the Isles of Scilly, so it was a long way for him to come, and expensive too. Besides which, he hated big cities like London. I’m sure if I’d seen him more often, I’d have got used to him – used to his face and his hands and his silent, uncommunicative ways.

  I don’t blame my mother and father. I can see now why they were so tense before each visit. Being as taciturn and unsmiling as he was, Grandpa can’t have been an easy guest. But, even so, they did make it a lot worse for me than they needed to. Just before Grandpa came there were always endless warnings, from Mother in particular (he was my grandpa on my mother’s side), about how I mustn’t upset him, how I mustn’t leave my toys lying about on the sitting-room floor because he didn??
?t see very well and might trip over them, how I mustn’t have the television on too much because Grandpa didn’t like noise. But most of all they drummed into me again and again that whatever I did I must not under any circumstances stare at him – that it was rude, that he hated people staring at him, particularly children.

  I tried not to; I tried very hard. When he first arrived I would always try to force myself to look at something else. Once I remember it was a Christmas decoration, a red paper bell hanging just above his head in the front hall. Sometimes I would make myself look very deliberately at his waistcoat perhaps, or the gold watch chain he always wore. I’d fix my gaze on anything just as long as it was nowhere near the forbidden places, because I knew that once I started looking at his forbidden face or his forbidden hands I wouldn’t be able to stop myself.

  But every time, sooner or later, I’d do it; I’d sneak a crafty look. And very soon that look became a stare. I was never at all revolted by what I saw. If I had been, I could have looked away easily. I think I was more fascinated than anything else, and horrified too, because I’d been told something of what had happened to him in the war. I saw the suffering he had gone through in his deep blue eyes – eyes that hardly ever blinked, I noticed. Then I’d feel my mother’s eyes boring into me, willing me to stop staring, or my father would kick me under the table. So I’d look at Grandpa’s waistcoat – but I could only manage it for a while. I couldn’t help myself. I had to look again at the forbidden places. He had three half-fingers on one hand and no fingers at all on the other. His top lip had almost completely disappeared and one of his ears was little more than a hole in his head.

  As I grew up I’d often ask about how exactly it had happened. My mother and father never seemed to want to tell me much about it. They claimed they didn’t know any more than they’d told me already – that Grandpa had been in the merchant navy in the Second World War, that his ship had been torpedoed in the Atlantic, and he’d been terribly burnt. He’d been adrift in a boat for days and days, they told me, before he’d been picked up. He’d spent the rest of the war in a special hospital.

  Every time I looked at his face and hands the story seemed to want to tell itself again in my head. I so much wanted to know more. And I wanted to know more about my grandmother too, but that was a story that made everyone even more tight-lipped. I knew she was called Annie, but I had never met her and no one ever talked about her. All anyone would ever say was that she had “gone away” a very long time ago, before I was born. I longed to ask Grandpa himself about his ship being torpedoed, about my grandmother too, but I never dared, not even when I was older and got to know him a lot better.

  I must have been about twelve when I first went to see him on my own in the Scilly Isles for my summer holiday, and by then the nightmares had gone. That’s not to say I wasn’t still apprehensive in those first few days after I arrived. But I was always happy to be there, happy just to get out of London. I’d go and stay with him in his cottage on Bryher – a tiny island, only about eighty people live there. He had no electricity, only a generator in a shed outside, which he’d switch off before he went to bed. The cottage wasn’t much more than a shed, either. It was a different world for me and I loved it. He lived by himself and lived simply. The place smelt of warm damp and paraffin oil and fish – we had fish for almost every meal. He made some kind of living out of catching lobsters and crabs. How he managed to go fishing with his hands as they were I’ll never know. But he did.

  It was years before I discovered why he never smiled. It was because he couldn’t. It was too painful. The skin simply wouldn’t stretch. When he laughed, which wasn’t often, it was always with a straight face. And when he smiled it was with his eyes only. I’d never understood that when I was little. His eyes were the same blue as the sea around Scilly on a fine day. He was silent, I discovered, because he liked to keep himself to himself. I’m a bit the same, so I didn’t mind. He wasn’t at all unkind or morose, just quiet. He’d read a lot in the evenings, for hours, anything about boats – Arthur Ransome, C. S. Forester and Patrick O’Brian. He didn’t have a television, so I’d read them too. I think I must have read every book Arthur Ransome wrote during my holidays on Scilly.

  During the day he’d let me do what I liked. I could run free. I’d wander the island all day; I’d go climbing on the rocks on Samson Hill or Droppy Nose Point. I’d go swimming in Rushy Bay, shrimping off Green Bay. But as I got older he’d ask me to go out fishing with him more and more. He liked the company, I think, or maybe it was because he needed the help, even if he never said so. I’d catch wrasse and pollack for baiting his lobster pots. I’d help him haul them in and extract the catch. We would work almost silently together, our eyes meeting from time to time. Sometimes he’d catch me staring at him as he had when I was little. All those years later and I still couldn’t help myself. But now it was different. Now all the fear had gone. Now I knew him well enough to smile at him when our eyes met, and, as I was later to find out, he understood perfectly well why I was staring at him, at his forbidden face, his forbidden hands.

  It wasn’t until the summer I just left school that Grandpa first told me himself about what had happened to him when his ship went down. He talked more these days, but never as much as the day we saw the gannets. We were out in his fishing boat. We’d picked up the pots, caught a few mackerel for supper, and were coming back in a lumpy sea round the back of Bryher, when a pair of gannets flew over and dived together, spearing the sea just ahead of us. “See that, Grandpa?” I cried. “Aren’t they brilliant?”

  “Better than brilliant,” he said. “They bring you good luck, you know.”

  We watched the gannets surface, swallow their catch and take off again. We caught each other’s eye and smiled, enjoying the moment together.

  “You know what I like about you, Michael?” he went on. “You look at me. Most people don’t. Your mother doesn’t, and she’s my own daughter. She looks away. Most people look away. Not that I blame them. I did once. Not any more. But you don’t look away.” He smiled. “You’ve been having sneaky old looks at me ever since you were knee-high to a grasshopper. If you looked away it was only to be polite, I always knew that. You’ve always wanted to ask me, haven’t you? You wanted to know, didn’t you? How this happened, I mean.”

  He touched his face. “I never told anyone before, not your mother, not even Annie. I just told them what they needed to know and no more, that my ship went down and after a few days in a lifeboat I got picked up. That’s all I said. The rest they could see for themselves.” He was looking straight ahead of him, steering the boat as he was talking.

  “I was a handsome enough devil before that – looked a bit like you do now. Annie and me got married a couple of years before the war broke out. A year later, I was in the merchant navy, in a convoy coming back from America. My third trip, it was.” He looked out towards Scilly Rock and wiped his face with the back of his hand. “It was a day like this, the day we copped it – the day I became half a man. Early evening, it happened. I’d seen ships go down before, dozens of them, and every time I thanked God it wasn’t me. Now it was my turn.

  We caught each other’s eye and smiled, enjoying the moment together.

  “I was on watch when the first torpedo struck. Never saw it coming. The first hit us amidships. The second blew off the stern – took it right off. All hell broke loose. A great ball of fire came roaring through the ship, set me on fire and cooked me like a sausage. Jim – Jim Channing, he came from Scilly too, him and me were mates, always were, even at school, joined up together – he smothered the flames, put them out. Then he helped me to the side. I’d never even have got that far without Jim. He made me jump. I didn’t want to, because the sea was on fire. But he made me. He had hold of me and swam me away from the ship, so’s we wouldn’t get sucked down, he said. He got me to a lifeboat. There were too many in it already and they didn’t want us.”

  I could see it! I could see it in my head. It
was straight out of my nightmare.

  “Jim said that he could hang on to the side but I’d been burnt and they had to help me into the boat. In the end they did, and Jim clung on beside me, still in the water, and we talked. We had to talk, and keep talking, Jim told me, so we didn’t go to sleep, because if we went to sleep, like as not we’d never wake up again. So we told each other all the stories we knew: Peter Rabbit, the Just So Stories – anything we could remember. When we ran out of stories, we tried singing songs instead: ‘Ten Green Bottles’, ‘Oranges and Lemons’, anything. Time and again I dropped off to sleep, but Jim would always wake me up. Then one time I woke and Jim just wasn’t there. He was gone. I’ve thought about Jim every day of my life since, but I’ve never spoken about him, until now.

  “He’s out there, Michael. Jim’s out there, down in the deep somewhere. They all are, all the lads that went down in that ship, good lads. And there’s been plenty of times since, I can tell you, when I wished to God I’d gone down with them.”

  He said nothing more for a while. I’d never heard him talk like this before, never. But he hadn’t finished yet.

  “All we saw for days on end were gannets,” he went on. “Except once we did see a whale, a ruddy great whale. But that was all. No ships. No aeroplanes. Nothing. Just sea and sky. Some of the lads were burnt even worse than I was. They didn’t last long. We were out there on the open ocean for a week or more. No food, no water. I lost count of the days and the nights. By then I didn’t know any more who was alive and who was dead, and what’s more I didn’t care. I only knew I was still alive. That was all that mattered to me. I lived on nothing but hope, and a dream. I had a dream and I clung on to it. I dreamt of getting back to Annie, of coming home. I thought if I dreamt it hard enough, hoped for it hard enough, it must come true.