‘It isn’t that important,’ I hedged. ‘It’s just that I keep wondering what it was like here when it was a working farm and before somebody tarted up the buildings at the back, and when there were animals around the place, and manure heaps.’
‘Then we’ll go to the village, like I said. The beer is good there. The further north you get from London, people say, the better the ale. I fancy a couple of pints!’
‘So who’s going to drive?’
‘You, Cassie. It’s your car.’
‘And drink Coke and orange juice all night?’
‘OK! There are loads of bikes in the stable. What say we pick out a couple, put some air in the tyres, and go supping in style?’
‘Can you get done for being drunk in charge of a bike?’ I giggled.
‘I don’t know. It depends how well you can ride one, I suppose.’
We decided to have an early tea. Fresh brown eggs, boiled, and crusty bread, then a huge dollop of the home-baked parkin Mum had slipped into the boot just as I was leaving. After which, Jeannie said she’d better have a dummy run, just to make sure she hadn’t forgotten how to ride.
It was all so lovely and free and easy. We were like a couple of kids let early out of school, and in a way I was a bit sad about it because next August, when I was writing book three and on the way to becoming a real, time-served novelist, I would look back to how it had been that summer at Deer’s Leap, and wonder who had bought the house and if they loved it as much as I did. And I knew they wouldn’t, couldn’t.
We wore leggings, the better to ride in, and shirts. Then we stuffed cardies in the saddlebags in case it was cold riding home. We pushed the bikes along the dirt road, neither of us being confident enough to brave the potholes.
When we got to the crossroads I said, ‘If we meet anything on the road, I’ll ride ahead, OK?’
‘If we meet anything on this narrow lane, I shall get off and stand on the verge! But there’s hardly any traffic hereabouts. What are you expecting – a furniture van?’
I almost said, ‘No – a flock of sheep,’ but I didn’t and we managed, after a couple of false starts and a few wobbles, to get going.
‘Don’t look down at your front wheel, Jeannie! Look at the road ahead. Y’know, I could get to like this. They say you never forget how to ride a bike.’
Jeannie soon got the hang of it and went ahead just at the spot I’d first seen the airman. I slowed and had a good look around, then told myself not to be greedy; that one sighting a day was all I could hope for.
‘Hey! Wait for me, show-off!’ I called, then pedalled like mad to catch her up.
The Red Rose wasn’t too crowded and we got a table beside an open window. Jeannie said she would get the first round and asked me what I was drinking.
‘Bitter, please. A half.’
She returned with two pint glasses, then asked me how I liked the Rose.
‘It’s ages old, isn’t it?’ The ceiling was very low, and beamed; the lounge end of the one long room had better seats in it than the other end, where there was a dartboard but not a slot machine in sight.
‘I could get to like this place,’ I said, lifting my glass. ‘Cheers!’
‘We’re in luck.’ Jeannie took a long drink from her glass. ‘Bill Jarvis is in the far corner. Would you like to meet him?’
‘You know I would! Are you going to ask him to join us?’
‘I’ll take him a pint and tell him it’s from a young lady who would like to talk to him.
‘He’s scoring for the darts, but he’ll be over in about five minutes,’ she said when she came back alone. ‘He said thanks for the beer, by the way.’
‘This is a lovely old pub. I’m glad they haven’t modernized it – made it into a gin palace.’
‘There’s no fear of that happening.’ She raised her eyes to the ceiling, which was pale khaki. ‘The last time it got a lick of paint was for the Coronation. When it was first built, in the early fourteen hundreds, it was the churchwarden’s house, and I don’t think it’s changed a lot since – apart from flush toilets outside.’
‘I suppose,’ I said, ‘that at the time of the Wars of the Roses, a churchwarden was quite an important man, in the village.’
‘Mm. He held one of the three keys to the parish chest – y’know, social security, medieval style. The other two keyholders would be the priest and the local squire. The parish chest is still in the church, but there’s nothing in it. You must go and see it before you go back.’
She was already halfway down her glass. My dad, I thought, would approve of Jeannie McFadden.
‘There’s a lot of things I must see and do,’ I said obliquely, ‘before I go back. But I think your friend is coming over …’
An elderly man made his way to our table, puffing out clouds of tobacco smoke that made me glad of the open window.
‘Now then, lass,’ he said to Jeannie, ignoring me completely, ‘what was it you wanted to know?’
‘It’s my friend, actually, Bill. She’s taken a liking to Deer’s Leap and wants to know all about it. She’s a writer,’ she added.
‘Then I’m saying nowt, or it’ll all be in a book!’
‘I write fiction, Mr Jarvis,’ I said, holding out my hand. ‘What I’m interested in is the history of the house. I’m not prying. I’m Cassie, by the way. What are you drinking?’
‘Nowt at the moment, though I wouldn’t say no to a pint of bitter.’ Reluctantly he shook my hand.
‘I want to know,’ I said, when he was settled at the table, ‘who lived at Deer’s Leap in the war. Jeannie said the Air Force just turfed them out without a by-your-leave. I’d have hated that if it had been my house.’
‘Ar, but my generation had to put up with that war and we hated it, an’ all. Didn’t stop the high-ups from London taking whatever they wanted, for all that. Smiths had no choice but to sell up and get out.’
‘And where did they go?’
‘Can’t rightly say, lass. Got my calling-up papers, so what became of ’em, I never knew.’
‘Did they have a family, Mr Jarvis?’
‘Not as you’d call a family – nobbut one bairn, three or four years younger than me. Susan, if I remember rightly.’
Susan Smith, I brooded, then all at once I remembered the initials S. S. and a tiny heart on the strap of the airman’s gas mask. The initials stood for Susan Smith. She, likely, had put them there!
‘How old was Susan when she had to leave Deer’s Leap?’ I managed to ask, a kind of triumph singing inside me.
‘Now then – I’d just been called up, as I remember. Was twenty-two. Usually they took you afore that, but they’d let a young man finish his training, sort of. I was ’prenticed to a cabinet-maker, so as soon as I’d done my time they called me into the Engineers and taught me about electrics! Any road, that would make the Smith lass about eighteen or nineteen. I’m seventy-six, so she would be seventy-two or -three now – if her’s still alive. Fair, she was, and bonny, but quiet, as I remember.’
‘It was rotten about their land