The Kings went away and the teacher rubbed at the yellow on the carpets with her washing-up brush. The landing carpet was marked anyway, he pointed out, poking a finger at the stains left behind by the paint she’d removed herself with the sponge-cloth from the bathroom. She must be delighted with the kitchen, he said.
She knew she mustn’t speak. She’d known she mustn’t when the Kings had been there; she knew she mustn’t now. She might have reminded the Kings that she’d chosen the original colours in the kitchen herself. She might have complained to the man as he rubbed at her carpets that the carpets would never be the same again. She watched him, not saying anything, not wishing to be regarded as a nuisance. The Kings would have considered her a nuisance too, agreeing to let children into her kitchen to paint it and then making a fuss. If she became a nuisance the teacher and the Kings would drift on to the same side, and the Reverend Bush would somehow be on that side also, and Miss Tingle, and even Mrs Grove and Mrs Halbert. They would agree among themselves that what had happened had to do with her elderliness, with her not understanding that children who brought paint into a kitchen were naturally going to use it.
‘I defy anyone to notice that,’ the teacher said, standing up, gesturing at the yellow blurs that remained on her carpets. He put his jacket on. He left the washing-up brush and the bowl of water he’d been using on the floor of her sitting-room. ‘All’s well that ends well,’ he said. ‘Thanks for your cooperation, Mrs Malby.’
She thought of her two sons, Derek and Roy, not knowing quite why she thought of them now. She descended the stairs with the teacher, who was cheerfully talking about community relations. You had to make allowances, he said, for kids like that; you had to try and understand; you couldn’t just walk away.
Quite suddenly she wanted to tell him about Derek and Roy. In the desire to talk about them she imagined their bodies, as she used to in the past, soon after they’d been killed. They lay on desert sand, desert birds swooped down on them. Their four eyes were gone. She wanted to explain to the teacher that they’d been happy, a contented family in Catherine Street, until the war came and smashed everything to pieces. Nothing had been the same afterwards. It hadn’t been easy to continue with nothing to continue for. Each room in the house had contained different memories of the two boys growing up. Cooking and cleaning had seemed pointless. The shop which would have been theirs would have to pass to someone else.
And yet time had soothed the awful double wound. The horror of the emptiness had been lived with, and if having the Kings in the shop now wasn’t the same as having your sons there at least the Kings were kind. Thirty-four years after the destruction of your family you were happy in your elderliness because time had been merciful. She wanted to tell the teacher that also, she didn’t know why, except that in some way it seemed relevant. But she didn’t tell him because it would have been difficult to begin, because in the effort there’d be the danger of seeming senile. Instead she said goodbye, concentrating on that. She said she was sorry, saying it just to show she was aware that she hadn’t made herself clear to the children. Conversation had broken down between the children and herself, she wanted him to know she knew it had.
He nodded vaguely, not listening to her. He was trying to make the world a better place, he said. ‘For kids like that, Mrs Malby. Victims of broken homes.’
Matilda’s England
1. The Tennis Court
Old Mrs Ashburton used to drive about the lanes in a governess cart drawn by a donkey she called Trot. We often met her as we cycled home from school, when my brother and my sister were at the Grammar School and I was still at the village school. Of the three of us I was Mrs Ashburton’s favourite, and I don’t know why that was except that I was the youngest. ‘Hullo, my Matilda,’ Mrs Ashburton would whisper in her throaty, crazysounding way. ‘Matilda,’ she’d repeat, lingering over the name I so disliked, drawing each syllable away from the next. ‘Dear Matilda.’ She was excessively thin, rather tall, and frail-looking. We made allowances for her because she was eighty-one.
Usually when we met her she was looking for wild flowers, or if it was winter or autumn just sitting in her governess cart in some farmer’s gateway, letting the donkey graze the farmer’s grass. In spring she used to root out plants from the hedges with a little trowel. Most of them were weeds, my brother said; and looking back on it now, I realize that it wasn’t for wild flowers, or weeds, or grazing for her donkey that she drove about the lanes. It was in order to meet us cycling back from school.
‘There’s a tennis court at Challacombe Manor,’ she said one day in May, 1939. ‘Any time you ever wanted to play, Dick.’ She stared at my brother with piercing black eyes that were the colour of quality coal. She was eccentric, standing there in a long, very old and bald fur coat, stroking the ears of her donkey while he nibbled a hedge. Her hat was attached to her grey hair by a number of brass hat-pins. The hat was of faded green felt, the hat-pins had quite large knobs at the ends of them, inlaid with pieces of green glass. Green, Mrs Ashburton often remarked, was her favourite colour, and she used to remove these hat-pins to show us the glass additions, emphasizing that they were valueless. Her bald fur coat was valueless also, she assured us, and not even in its heyday would it have fetched more than five pounds. In the same manner she remarked upon her summer hats and dresses, and her shoes, and the governess cart, and the donkey.
‘I mean, Dick,’ she said that day in 1939, ‘it’s not much of a tennis court, but it was once, of course. And there’s a net stacked away in one of the outhouses. And a roller, and a marker. There’s a lawn-mower, too, because naturally you’ll need that.’
‘You mean, we could play on your court, Mrs Ashburton?’ my sister Betty said.
‘Of course I mean that, my dear. That’s just what I mean. You know, before the war we really did have marvellous tennis parties at Challacombe. Everyone came.’
‘Oh, how lovely!’ Betty was fourteen and Dick was a year older, and I was nine. Betty was fair-haired like the rest of us, but much prettier than me. She had very blue eyes and a wide smiling mouth that boys at the Grammar School were always trying to kiss, and a small nose, and freckles. Her hair was smooth and long, the colour of hay. It looked quite startling sometimes, shining in the sunlight. I used to feel proud of Betty and Dick when they came to collect me every afternoon at Mrs Pritchard’s school. Dick was to leave the Grammar School in July, and on the afternoons of that warm May, as Betty and I cycled home with him, we felt sorry that he wouldn’t be there next term. But Dick said he was glad. He was big, as tall as my father, and very shy. He’d begun to smoke, a habit not approved of by my father. On the way home from school we had to stop and go into a ruined cottage so that he could have a Woodbine. He was going to work on the farm; one day the farm would be his.
‘It would be lovely to play tennis,’ Betty said.
‘Then you must, my dear. But if you want to play this summer you’ll have to get the court into trim.’ Mrs Ashburton smiled at Betty in a way that made her thin, elderly face seem beautiful. Then she smiled at Dick. ‘I was passing the tennis court the other day, Dick, and I suddenly thought of it. Now why shouldn’t those children get it into trim? I thought. Why shouldn’t they come and play, and bring their friends?’
‘Yes,’ Dick said.
‘Why ever don’t you come over to Challacombe on Saturday? Matilda, too, of course. Come for tea, all three of you.’
Mrs Ashburton smiled at each of us in turn. She nodded at us and climbed into the governess cart. ‘saturday,’ she repeated.
‘Honestly, Betty!’ Dick glared crossly at my sister, as though she were responsible for the invitation. ‘I’m not going, you know.’
He cycled off, along the narrow, dusty lane, big and red-faced and muttering. We followed him more slowly, talking about Mrs Ashburton. ‘Poor old thing!’ Betty said, which was what people round about often said when Mrs Ashburton was mentioned, or when she was seen in her governess cart.
/> The first thing I remember in all my life was my father breaking a fountain-pen. It was a large black-and-white pen, like tortoiseshell or marble. That was the fashion for fountain-pens then: two or three colours marbled together, green and black, blue and white, red and black-and-white. Conway Stewart, Waterman’s, Blackbird. Propelling pencils were called Eversharp.
The day my father broke his pen I didn’t know all that: I learnt it afterwards, when I went to school. I was three the day he broke the pen. ‘It’s just a waste of blooming money!’ he shouted. He smashed the pen across his knee while my mother anxiously watched. Waste of money or not, she said, it wouldn’t help matters to break the thing. She fetched him the ink and a dip-pen from a drawer of the dresser. He was still angry, but after a minute or two he began to laugh. He kissed my mother, pulling her down on to the knee he’d broken the pen over. Dick, who must have been nine then, didn’t even look up from his homework. Betty was there too, but I can’t remember what she was doing.
The kitchen hasn’t changed much. The old range has gone, but the big light-oak dresser is still there, with the same brass handles on its doors and drawers and the same Wedgwood-blue dinner-set on its shelves, and cups and jugs hanging on hooks. The ceiling is low, the kitchen itself large and rectangular, with the back stairs rising from the far end of it, and a door at the bottom of them. There are doors to the pantry and the scullery, and to the passage that leads to the rest of the house, and to the yard. There’s a long narrow light-oak table, with brass handles on its drawers, like the dresser ones, and oak chairs that aren’t as light as all the other oak because chairs darken with use. But the table isn’t scrubbed once a week any more, and the brass doesn’t gleam. I know, because now and again I visit the farmhouse.
I remember the kitchen with oil-lamps, and the time, the day after my fifth birthday, when the men came to wire the house for electricity. My mother used to talk about an Aga, and often when she took us shopping with her she’d bring us to Archers’, the builders’ merchants, to look at big cream-coloured Agas. After a time, Mr Gray of the Aga department didn’t even bother to bustle up to her when he saw her coming. She’d stand there, plump and pink-cheeked, her reddish hair neat beneath the brim of her hat, touching the display models, opening the oven doors and lifting up the two big hot-plate covers. When we returned to the farmhouse my father would tease her, knowing she’d been to Archers’ again. She’d blush, cutting ham at teatime or offering round salad. My father would then forget about it. ‘Well, I’m damned,’ he’d say, and he’d read out an item from the weekly paper, about some neighbouring farmer or new County Council plans. My mother would listen and then both of them would nod. They were very good friends, even though my father teased her. She blushed like a rose, he said: he teased her to see it.
Once, before the electricity came, I had a nightmare. It was probably only a few months before, because when I came crying down to the kitchen my father kept comforting me with the reminder that it would soon be my fifth birthday. ‘You’ll never cry then, Matilda,’ he whispered to me, cuddling me to him. ‘Big girls of five don’t cry.’ I fell asleep, but it’s not that that I remember now, not the fear from the nightmare going away, or the tears stopping, or my father’s caressing: it’s the image of my parents in the kitchen as I stumbled down the back stairs. There were two oil-lamps lit and the fire in the range was glowing red-hot behind its curved bars, and the heavy black kettle wasn’t quite singing. My father was asleep with last Saturday’s weekly paper on his knees, my mother was reading one of the books from the bookcase in the dining-room we never used, probably The Garden of Allah, which was her favourite. The two sheepdogs were asleep under the table, and when I opened the door at the top of the stairs they both barked because they knew that at that particular time no one should be opening that door. ‘Oh, now, now,’ my mother said, coming to me, listening to me when I said that there were cows on my bedroom wall. I remember the image of the two of them because they looked so happy sitting there, even though my mother hadn’t got her Aga, even though my father was sometimes worried about the farm.
Looking back on it now, there was a lot of happiness, although perhaps not more than many families experience. Everything seems either dismal or happy in retrospect, and the happiness in the farmhouse is what I think of first whenever I think now of that particular past. I remember my mother baking in the kitchen, flour all over her plump arms, and tiny beads of moisture on her forehead, because the kitchen was always hot. I remember my father’s leathery skin and his smile, and the way he used to shout at the sheepdogs, and the men, Joe and Arthur, sitting on yellow stubble, drinking tea out of a bottle, on a day hay had been cut.
Our farm had once been the home-farm of Challacombe Manor, even though our farmhouse was two miles away from the manor house. There’d been servants and gardeners at Challacombe Manor then, and horses in the stables, and carriages coming and going. But the estate had fallen into rack and ruin after the First World War because Mr Ashburton hadn’t been able to keep it going and in the end, in 1924, he’d taken out various mortgages. When he died, in 1929, the extent of his debts was so great that Mrs Ashburton had been obliged to let Lloyd’s Bank foreclose on the mortgages, which is how it came about that my father bought Challacombe Farm. It was a tragedy, people round about used to say, and the real tragedy was that Mr Ashburton had come back from the war in such a strange state that he hadn’t minded about everywhere falling into rack and ruin. According to my father, Lloyd’s Bank owned Challacombe Manor itself and had granted Mrs Ashburton permission to live there in her lifetime. It wouldn’t surprise him, my father said, if it turned out that Lloyd’s Bank owned Mrs Ashburton as well. ‘He drank himself to death,’ people used to say about Mr Ashburton. ‘She watched him and didn’t have the heart to stop him.’ Yet before the First World War Mr Ashburton had been a different kind of man, energetic and sharp. The Challacombe estate had been a showpiece.
To me in particular Mrs Ashburton talked about her husband. She was lucky that he’d come back from the war, even if he hadn’t been able to manage very well. His mind had been affected, she explained, but that was better than being dead. She told me about the men who’d died, gardeners at Challacombe Manor, and farm workers on the estate, and men she and her husband had known in the town. ‘I thanked God,’ Mrs Ashburton said, ‘when he came safely back here all in one piece. Everything fell to bits around us, but it didn’t matter because at least he was still alive. You understand, Matilda?’
I always nodded, although I didn’t really understand. And then she’d go on about the estate as it had been, and then about her husband and the conversations they used to have. Sometimes she didn’t address me directly. She smiled and just talked, always returning to the men who had been killed and how lucky she was that her husband had at least come back. She’d prayed, she said, that he’d come back, and every time another man from the estate or from the neighbourhood had been reported dead she’d felt that there was a better chance that her husband wouldn’t die also. ‘By the law of averages,’ she explained, ‘some had to come back. Some men have always come back from wars, you convince yourself.’
At this point I would always nod again, and Mrs Ashburton would say that looking back on it now she felt ashamed that she had ever applied the law of averages to the survival or death of men. Doing so was as horrible as war itself: the women who were left at home became cruel in their fear and their selfishness. Cruelty was natural in war, Mrs Ashburton said.
At the time she’d hated the Germans and she was ashamed of that too, because the Germans were just people like other people. But when she talked about them the remains of the hatred were still in her voice, and I imagined the Germans from what she told me about them: people who ate black bread and didn’t laugh much, who ate raw bacon, who were dour, grey and steely. She described the helmets they wore in wartime. She told me what a bayonet was, and I used to feel sick when I thought of one going into a man’s stomach and being twi
sted in there to make sure the man would die. She told me about poison gas, and the trenches, and soldiers being buried alive. The way she spoke I knew she was repeating, word for word, the things her husband had told her, things that had maybe been the cause of his affected mind. Even her voice sounded unusual when she talked about the war, as though she was trying to imitate her husband’s voice, and the terror that had been in it. He used to cry, she said, as he walked about the gardens, unable to stop the tears once they’d begun.
Dick didn’t say anything while we rode the two miles over to Challacombe Manor that Saturday. He didn’t even say anything when he suddenly dismounted and leaned his bicycle against a black gate, and climbed over the gate to have a smoke behind the hedge. If my father had come by he’d have known what was happening because he would have seen Betty and myself waiting in the lane, surrounded by the cloud of smoke that Dick always managed to make with his Woodbine. Our job was to warn him if we saw my father coming, but my father didn’t come that afternoon and when Dick had finished we continued on our way.
We’d often been to tea at Challacombe Manor before. Mrs Ashburton said we were the only visitors she had because most of her friends were dead, which was something that happened, she explained, if you were eighty-one. We always had tea in the kitchen, a huge room that smelt of oil, with armchairs in it and a wireless, and an oil-stove on which Mrs Ashburton cooked, not wishing to have to keep the range going. There were oatcakes for tea, and buttered white and brown bread, and pots of jam that Mrs Ashburton bought in the town, and a cake she bought also, usually a fruitcake. Afterwards we’d walk through the house with her, while she pointed out the places where the roof had given way, and the dry rot, and windows that were broken. She hadn’t lived in most of the house since the war, and had lived in even less of it since her husband had died in 1929. We knew these details by heart because she’d told us so many times. In one of the outhouses there was an old motor-car with flattyres, and the gardens were now all overgrown with grass and weeds. Rhododendrons were choked, and buddleia and kerria and hydrangeas.