‘Pamela, we’ll miss the bus!’
A spoon of porridge went in, and then I pulled the flour-sack tabard over her head. ‘I don’t want to go shopping,’ she growled, her face pasty with anger.
‘I will carry you if I have to,’ I vowed.
I did have to carry her. She dragged her feet, stumbled to her knees, squatted down, all the while yanking at my hand, until I was forced to hoist her into my arms. Just as I broke into a clumsy trot, my shopping basket bouncing against my hip, the bus to Waltham passed by the end of the lane on its way to the stop. I called out, ‘Wait! Wait!’ without the remotest chance of being heard. Perhaps a passenger was alighting: we might still make it. But the bus roared on, flashing through the gaps in the hedge, and I hurried the last few paces to the junction only to see it vanishing heedless into the dip at the bend of the road. I set Pamela on the ground, absolutely winded.
‘There,’ I said. ‘Look what you’ve done. We’ve missed the bus.’
‘I know.’ Her eyes were dancing and a delicious bloom had spread over her face.
My own eyes stung with frustrated tears. I watched the bus emerge from the dip and rush on up the hill, through the bare trees and away to Waltham.
‘I was going to get you warm clothes and new knickers, Pamela, but I can’t now. You’ll just have to sit naked while I wash your old ones. Uncomfortable, and cold.’
In response she started her nasty, rattling giggle.
‘Stop it!’ I shouted, but the giggling sharpened, accompanied now by a knowing leer.
I shoved my hands deep in my pockets and breathed right to the bottom of my lungs. ‘Pamela. Please.’
Her face crumpled and she started crying, high and strident as a lamb. I crouched down and put my arms around her.
‘Mummy’s not coming. Mummy’s not ever coming again.’
‘No. Darling, Mummy won’t come back.’
‘Never come back.’
‘No.’
‘Mummy’s gone.’
‘Yes.’
She pulled away from me, her wet eyes clear hazel, almost round.
‘She didn’t go with the candle man, did she. And she didn’t go to Aunt Margie where the grapes are either. Those are just tellings.’
‘That’s right, sweetheart.’
She leaned back into me, her breath whiffling through her nose. Then she spoke again, her lips moving against my neck. ‘I bet you’re going to say she’s gone to Heaven.’
I held her tight but without clinging. More to stop her falling. ‘Yes, Pamela, I am going to say that. Mummy’s gone to Heaven.’
Smack – her small palm hit me squarely on the cheek. She sprang backwards out of my arms. ‘Nasty lady!’ she cried, and ran off down the road towards the blind bend. There was something coming the other way. The thunder of a big engine, filling the air.
‘Pamela!’ I dashed after her. ‘Pamela!’ I shouted again, as a tractor rounded the corner, pulling a huge, spined harrow that seemed to fill the road. I ran harder, flung my arm out and grasped hold of the flour sack, tugging her onto the verge at the very instant the tractor roared past us, the harrow bouncing after it, missing us by a foot. Pamela and I both fell down, she under me, screaming like a child in a collapsing building. She flailed at me but I grabbed her hands. She screamed higher: her palms were grazed.
I heard a shout, turned my head. The tractor had slowed down and was pulling into the wide field gateway opposite the bus stop. Then the driver jumped down and ran back towards us. A small woman galumphing in wellingtons. As diminutive, sallow-faced, black-eyed as ever, and the black eyes just now furious.
‘Ellen Parr, what the bloody hell are you up to?’ bellowed Lucy Horne. ‘I nearly crushed that child!’
‘WHAT DOES IT LOOK LIKE?’ I clung hard to Pamela, who was thrashing like a landed fish. ‘I’m trying to take care of her!’
‘You’re makin a bloody awful job of it!’
‘I’m aware of that!’ I cried.
She glared back, panting, her almost permanent wheeze audible after the mad dash and the telling-off. Then I let go of Pamela and put my face in my hands.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘We missed the bus.’
My cares came mounting one upon the other. It was the bus, and Pamela’s naughtiness, and her dead mother. It was the white flares over Southampton, and the smell of bombing in the people’s coats. And it was Lucy herself. I had no idea of the reason for her muteness, her ostentatiously blank stares, her turning of the shoulder at church or in the village hall. She’d been my bridesmaid, for goodness’ sake.
Well, she was certainly speaking to me now.
I took my hands away from my face. She was holding a dumbstruck Pamela by one hand, alternately frowning at me and squinting up the road towards the tractor. Then she gave an explosive sigh. ‘Bloody hell, Ellen.’
‘Yes.’ I got slowly to my feet and took Pamela’s other hand. The child, ash-pale, allowed it. ‘I won’t keep you, Lucy,’ I said. ‘I need to take Pamela home and get her warm.’
Lucy gave a short chuckle. ‘Darned if that’s not my old smock, under that flour sack.’
‘Yes.’
‘Glad it came in handy.’
Another pause, which Lucy filled with a long, ruminative sniff. Then she released Pamela. ‘I’ll just run that harrow into the field. I’m going home for my dinner anyway, so you might as well have a warm-up at my house. Harry Parker won’t know if I take a couple on the back.’ She gave me a dark glance. ‘If you was inclined to come, of course.’
We rumbled into the village, perched on the back of the tractor seat. Pamela gazed dully at the receding road. I pointed out the milk churns on the high stand at the end of the main street, and she blinked slowly in response but didn’t turn her head to look. What did she care for churns, motherless as she was.
Motherless, and in the charge, furthermore, of an incompetent, childless woman. Who would give a child to me? Perhaps she should go to a family after all. At least that way she wouldn’t end up under the wheels of a tractor. I twisted round in my seat, saw Lucy’s shoulders, hunched high and stiff. She’d been on the tractor six months now, and her dainty little hands were skilful on the wheel. She’d been a kennelmaid before the war, and I knew she missed the hounds now that the hunt was closed. She would be a kennelmaid again, she hoped, when the world dropped back in kilter. I knew about these feelings and hopes of hers because George Horne, her father, had told Selwyn of them, in the course of general conversation, and Selwyn had told me. That was how I learned Lucy’s news, these days. I wondered, now that the ice had been broken in such a spectacular fashion, what this invitation would lead to.
She parked neatly on the triangle of grass at the end of the street. I clambered off the machine and jumped Pamela down. She stumbled against me as she landed. We walked the hundred yards up to the Hornes’ cottage.
‘We took three of ’em,’ Lucy said, as we went up the street, and I knew she meant refugees from Southampton.
‘Wherever did you put them?’
‘On the parlour floor.’ In the old days she’d have said, Yes, Ellen, ain’t it amazing. Being that our house is no more than a bloomin hovel. But I felt more sharply rebuked by this measured, adult response.