Singing for Mrs Pettigrew: A Story Maker's Journey

  When I heard the British had landed at San Carlos Bay I thought of you, and I prayed in the church in Stanley that I would be spared to see you again. They had no candles there. So I went out and bought a box of candles from the store and then I came back and lit them and prayed for me, for you, for your mother. An old lady in a scarf was kneeling at prayer. I saw her watching me as I came away. Her eyes met mine and she tried to smile. My English is not that good, but I remember her words. They echo still in my head.

  “This is not the way,” she said. “It is wrong, wrong.”

  “Yes,” I replied, and left her there.

  That was a few days ago now. Since then we have been stuck up here on these freezing hills above Stanley Town, digging in and waiting for the British, who come closer every day. And the bitter wind, from which we cannot hide, chills us to the bone, sapping the last of our strength and most of our courage too. What courage we have left we shall fight with, but courage will not be enough.

  I must finish now. I must fold you away in an envelope and face whatever I must face. As you have grown up, you may not have had a father, but I promise you, you have always had a father’s love.

  Goodbye, dear Carlos.

  And God bless.

  Papa

  sean rafferty

  Sean Rafferty is the least known of the three men who have inspired me to become a writer. Robert Louis Stevenson, of course, I never knew. But he is my friend in a way. Through his books I feel I know him. I long to meet him, to talk to him. Ted Hughes was a friend and my chief mentor. He encouraged me personally, as he did so many young writers, to believe in myself, to go on when the going got tough. Sean was a dear friend too, and our nearest neighbour for years. He lived simply, selflessly, generously. His death was as remarkable as his life.

  It was early one December morning, well before six o’clock. I was still in bed and half asleep when I heard the knock on the door and the sound of a tractor outside. I opened the window. David, our neighbouring farmer, was standing there, looking up at me, breathless and pale.

  “It’s Sean; I think he’s dead,” he said. “You’d better come, Michael.”

  I rode with him on the tractor, along the lane and then down the farm track towards the milking parlour, towards Burrow Cottage where Sean lived, David shouting to me all the time against the noise of the engine about how he’d found Sean in the lane on his way down to milking just minutes before. By now I could see Sean for myself. He was lying there outside the hen house. I knew he was dead before I even felt how cold he was, before I discovered how stiff he was, how hard to the touch. There was a stillness all around him, no wind in the trees. I remember thinking: Even in death you’re in tune with the world, Sean. You died where you belonged. A blackbird piped a requiem from high on the wall of the garden, Sean’s garden. I crouched there beside him and wept, my hand on his shoulder. His coat was wet from the rain. He’d fallen like a toy soldier and lay face down as if at attention, his hat half off, his stick and his right arm trapped underneath him.

  I was alone with Sean for a while, waiting for the doctor to come. I talked to him and it didn’t seem strange at all. The doctor came mercifully quickly. He spent more time comforting me than examining the body. “Listen,” he said, “here’s a man of nearly ninety who’s just died the best way you can. I reckon there must be a hundred ways you can go, and believe me, when the time comes this is the one you would want. Hale and hearty, still living at home, and he just shut down in an instant and keeled over. He’d have known nothing, I promise you. I can tell from the way he fell.”

  The police came too, routine they said, because it was a sudden death, and then the ambulance. Sean was taken away. I stood there in the lane watching the ambulance leave, and only then realized I was still holding his hat and his stick. The blackbird was still there, still piping.

  Sean Rafferty was in his life a poet, lyricist, playwright, then latterly a barman and a vegetable gardener. He was a man of great wisdom and learning, insightful, sensitive, kind, and above all a gentle spirit. And he was our friend. He had been almost a second father to Clare, my wife, as she grew up. Clare had spend most of her holidays staying with Sean and his wife Peggy at the pub they ran together, the Duke of York, in the remote Devon village of Iddesleigh. Here with Christian, Sean’s son from his first marriage, Clare first wandered and played in the fields and lanes of Devon, and here she came to love this place and its people. It was her paradise. She would spend her days with Christian messing about in streams, catching slow-worms in the graveyard, talking to foresters and farmers and thatchers, and looking after any animals she could, wild or domestic.

  So it was to the same place that she later returned with me and our children to set up Farms for City Children, because she wanted to enable thousands of city children to have the same life-enhancing experience she had had. By now Sean and Peggy were in their seventies and about to retire from the Duke of York. They came to live at Burrow Cottage nestling in the valley just below Nethercott House, the old Victorian manor house where the children from the cities came to stay for their week down on the farm. But Sean wanted to help. So he worked every day in the walled vegetable garden behind the house, growing vegetables for the children to harvest and eat. And every night he took it upon himself to shut up the hens because he lived nearer to them than us; and besides, he needed the walk up the lane last thing at night – it would be good for him, he said. We knew it wasn’t that. It was his way of helping out, that’s all.

  All this time, Sean was writing, squirrelling away his poems in the old oak coffer in his sitting room. Sometimes he would give us one for Christmas, but otherwise he would never talk of his work. He would simply do it quietly. We visited one another often, for Sunday lunch or to share a bottle of wine or two in the evening. And after Peggy died, he came so often he became one of the family. So now he was like a grandfather to us, and the dearest of friends to whom we could confide our hopes and fears, with whom we could talk straight and be ourselves. I have admired no one more, nor has Clare, I think; for Sean was a writer without ego, a generous-hearted man, a great listener with a knowing eye, a flawed and funny man who seemed to have found the inner peace we all yearn for. He lived simply, needing only warmth and whisky and Ryvita and oranges, and Bordeaux wine when we came. He was also the best-read man I have ever met.

  He went unrecognized for the most part. He didn’t care about that. We did. But he did want his poems collected and published; he wanted them to be there afterwards, I think. I remember his joy the day the Carcanet Press contract came, confirming that they would be publishing a collected works. The Bordeaux warmed by his fire down at Burrow tasted so good that evening. He joked often about dying, as we all do, to banish the fear, to postpone the moment. That was the evening he sat back in his chair, glass in hand, and laughed.

  “I know how it’ll be,” he said. “I’ll be going up that ruddy lane in the rain one night to see to those ruddy hens, and one of them will still be out as usual, and I’ll have to chase it in and shut them up. And then I’ll be walking back down the lane and I’ll drop dead just there, right outside the hen house. And the police will come and they’ll say: ‘Fowl play not suspected.’” And he laughed so much his wine spilt on his trousers.

  The collected poems were published, but Sean was dead a year before the book came out.

  We had a memorial service up in the church in Iddesleigh. The church was packed. We listened to the music we knew he loved, Mozart especially. Afterwards we went back home and drank to him in warm Bordeaux wine from the same glasses in the same room down at Burrow.

  He left no instructions as such, but Christian and his family and friends knew he always wanted his ashes to be scattered on the River Milk up in the borders of Scotland which he loved, where he’d grown up. He’d written of the place, of the event itself even, in one of his poems. Several years before he had written these lines:

  Rowan by the red rock, plead,

  gean
, white gean, in the green holm intercede

  for him,

  dipper in your flying vestments stay

  midstream on the dripping stone to pray

  for him

  on the first morning of his final day.

  And so it happened just as he foretold – he was good at this foretelling. As the ashes blew away and settled softly on the water, as they became a living part of the river, we saw a dipper sitting on a stone in the middle of the river, and waiting, watching us, waiting for him.

  singing for mrs pettigrew

  I was near by anyway, so I had every excuse to do it, to ignore the old adage and do something I’d been thinking of doing for many years. “Never go back. Never go back.” Those warning words kept repeating themselves in my head as I turned right at the crossroads outside Tillingham and began to walk the few miles along the road back to my childhood home in Bradwell, a place I’d last seen nearly fifty years before. I’d thought of it since, and often. I’d been there in my dreams, seen it so clearly in my mind, but of course I had always remembered it as it had been then. Fifty years would have changed things a great deal, I knew that. But that was part of the reason for my going back that day, to discover how intact was the landscape of my memories.

  I wondered if any of the people I had known then might still be there; the three Stebbing sisters perhaps, who lived together in the big house with honeysuckle over the porch, very proper people so Mother always wanted me to be on my best behaviour. It was no more than a stone’s throw from the sea and there always seemed to be a gull perched on their chimney pot. I remembered how I’d fallen ignominiously into their goldfish pond and had to be dragged out and dried off by the stove in the kitchen with everyone looking askance at me, and my mother so ashamed. Would I meet Bennie, the village thug who had knocked me off my bike once because I stupidly wouldn’t let him have one of my precious lemon sherbets? Would he still be living there? Would we recognize one another if we met?

  The whole silly confrontation came back to me as I walked. If I’d had the wit to surrender just one lemon sherbet he probably wouldn’t have pushed me, and I wouldn’t have fallen into a bramble hedge and had to sit there humiliated and helpless as he collected up my entire bagful of scattered lemon sherbets, shook them triumphantly in my face, and then swaggered off with his cronies, all of them scoffing at me, and scoffing my sweets too. I touched my cheek then as I remembered the huge thorn I had found sticking into it, the point protruding inside my mouth. I could almost feel it again with my tongue, taste the blood. A lot would never have happened if I’d handed over a lemon sherbet that day.

  That was when I thought of Mrs Pettigrew and her railway carriage and her dogs and her donkey, and the whole extraordinary story came flooding back crisp and clear, every detail of it, from the moment she found me sitting in the ditch holding my bleeding face and crying my heart out.

  She helped me up onto my feet. She would take me to her home. “It isn’t far,” she said. “I call it Dusit. It is a Thai word which means ‘halfway to heaven’.” She had been a nurse in Thailand, she said, a long time ago when she was younger. She’d soon have that nasty thorn out. She’d soon stop it hurting. And she did.

  The more I walked the more vivid it all became: the people, the faces, the whole life of the place where I’d grown up. Everyone in Bradwell seemed to me to have had a very particular character and reputation, unsurprising in a small village, I suppose: Colonel Burton with his clipped white moustache, who had a wife called Valerie, if I remembered right, with black pencilled eyebrows that gave her the look of someone permanently outraged – which she usually was. Neither the colonel nor his wife was to be argued with. They ruled the roost. They would shout at you if you dropped sweet papers in the village street or rode your bike on the pavement.

  Mrs Parsons, whose voice chimed like the bell in her shop when you opened the door, liked to talk a lot. She was a gossip, Mother said, but she was always very kind. She would often drop an extra lemon sherbet into your paper bag after she had poured your quarter pound from the big glass jar on the counter. I had once thought of stealing that jar, of snatching it and running off out of the shop, making my getaway like a bank robber in the films. But I knew the police would come after me in their shiny black cars with their bells ringing, and then I’d have to go to prison and Mother would be cross. So I never did steal Mrs Parsons’ lemon sherbet jar.

  Then there was Mad Jack, as we called him, who clipped hedges and dug ditches and swept the village street. We’d often see him sitting on the churchyard wall by the mounting block eating his lunch. He’d be humming and swinging his legs. Mother said he’d been fine before he went off to the war, but he’d come back with some shrapnel from a shell in his head and never been right since, and we shouldn’t call him Mad Jack, but we did. I’m ashamed to say we baited him sometimes too, perching alongside him on the wall, mimicking his humming and swinging our legs in time with his.

  But Mrs Pettigrew remained a mystery to everyone. This was partly because she lived some distance from the village and was inclined to keep herself to herself. She only came into the village to go to church on Sundays, and then she’d sit at the back, always on her own. I used to sing in the church choir, mostly because Mother made me, but I did like dressing up in the black cassock and white surplice and we did have a choir outing once a year to the cinema in Southminster – that’s where I first saw Snow White and Bambi and Reach for the Sky. I liked swinging the incense too, and sometimes I got to carry the cross, which made me feel very holy and very important. I’d caught Mrs Pettigrew’s eye once or twice as we processed by, but I’d always looked away. I’d never spoken to her. She smiled at people, but she rarely spoke to anyone; so no one spoke to her – not that I ever saw anyway. But there were reasons for this.

  Mrs Pettigrew was different. For a start she didn’t live in a house at all. She lived in a railway carriage, down by the sea wall with the great wide marsh all around her. Everyone called it Mrs Pettigrew’s Marsh. I could see it best when I rode my bicycle along the sea wall. The railway carriage was painted brown and cream and the word PULLMAN was printed in big black letters all along both sides above the windows. There were wooden steps up to the front door at one end, and a chimney at the other. The carriage was surrounded by trees and gardens, so I could only catch occasional glimpses of her and her dogs and her donkey, bees and hens. Tiny under her wide hat, she could often be seen planting out in her vegetable garden, or digging the dyke that ran around the garden like a moat, collecting honey from her beehives perhaps or feeding her hens. She was always outside somewhere, always busy. She walked or stood or sat very upright, I noticed, very neatly, and there was a serenity about her that made her unlike anyone else, and ageless too.

  But she was different in another way. Mrs Pettigrew was not like the rest of us to look at, because Mrs Pettigrew was “foreign”, from somewhere near China, I had been told. She did not dress like anyone else either. Apart from the wide-brimmed hat, she always wore a long black dress buttoned to the neck. And everything about her, her face and her hands, her feet, everything was tidy and tiny and trim, even her voice. She spoke softly to me as she helped me to my feet that day, every word precisely articulated. She had no noticeable accent at all, but spoke English far too well, too meticulously, to have come from England.

  So we walked side by side, her arm round me, a soothing silence between us, until we turned off the road onto the track that led across the marsh towards the sea wall in the distance. I could see smoke rising straight into the sky from the chimney of the railway carriage.

  “There we are: Dusit,” she said. “And look who is coming out to greet us.”

  Three greyhounds were bounding towards us followed by a donkey trotting purposefully but slowly behind them, wheezing at us rather than braying. Then they were gambolling all about us, and nudging us for attention. They were big and bustling, but I wasn’t afraid because they had nothing in their eyes but welcome
.

  “I call the dogs Fast, Faster and Fastest,” she told me. “But the donkey doesn’t like names. She thinks names are for silly creatures like people and dogs who can’t recognize one another without them. So I call her simply Donkey.” Mrs Pettigrew lowered her voice to a whisper. “She can’t bray properly – tries all the time but she can’t. She’s very sensitive too; takes offence very easily.” Mrs Pettigrew took me up the steps into her railway carriage home. “Sit down there by the window, in the light, so I can make your face better.”

  I was so distracted and absorbed by all I saw about me that I felt no pain as she cleaned my face, not even when she pulled out the thorn. She held it out to show me. It was truly a monster of a thorn. “The biggest and nastiest I have ever seen,” she said, smiling at me. Without her hat on she was scarcely taller than I was. She made me wash out my mouth and bathed the hole in my cheek with antiseptic. Then she gave me some tea which tasted very strange but warmed me to the roots of my hair. “Jasmine tea,” she said. “It is very healing, I find, very comforting. My sister sends it to me from Thailand.”

  The carriage was as neat and tidy as she was: a simple sitting room at the far end with just a couple of wicker chairs and a small table by the stove. And behind a half-drawn curtain I glimpsed a bed very low on the ground. There was no clutter, no pictures, no hangings, only a shelf of books that ran all the way round the carriage from end to end. I was sitting at the kitchen table, which looked out over the garden, then through the trees to the open marsh beyond.