‘Did you stay in the hotel just one night, darling?’
‘That’s what you do in hotels.’ She explained it to me. ‘You stay all night. They give you soft pillows. We took the pillows to the cellar when the raid started. I was comfy in the cellar but Mummy wasn’t.’
Her voice was so clear.
‘You don’t know what the hotel was called?’
‘No. But Mummy can tell you when she comes.’
I leaned back on my heels. ‘I thought we’d go and visit those bus ladies. They’re staying in an interesting house called Upton Hall. They have an enormous vegetable plot.’
Pamela looked unconvinced.
‘And a suit of armour. Like knights wear.’
That was more like it.
She had no coat, so I got a clean flour sack and pulled holes in the seams for head and arms. It did very well. I lifted her onto the bicycle rack and she clung to the saddle, face set.
‘Is it all right, Pamela?’
‘The bicycle is digging my bottom.’
I lifted her down again, glancing somewhat shamefully at the rack. No one could sit on those black bars. I went and got my old sheepskin from where it lay, somewhat yellowed, on the bedroom floor by my dressing table. Rolled up and tied tightly, it was perfect padding. Pamela screamed with delight as I pushed down hard on the pedal and we sailed off.
‘Ow, ow! You’re sitting on my fingers!’
‘Hold my waist, like I said. Arms round my middle.’
Selwyn’s fog had cleared and the sky was a pale, uncertain blue marked across with high, motionless bars of pearl-grey cloud. I heard a tinny rattle. ‘Take your feet away from the wheels, Pamela Pickering.’
‘How did you know my name?’
‘Mummy wrote it in your clothes.’
‘Well I never.’ She gave a breathless, adult little laugh.
We crossed the main road. The lane wound on, ruttier now. She was lighter than a quarter of grain, if more mobile. The hedges grew higher: nobody had cut them, and soon they’d be as tall as they had been when I was a child, and walked these lanes alone with one wet foot, my left foot. ‘I had a hole in my shoe when I was young, you know.’
‘Didn’t your mummy mend it?’
‘She didn’t know how.’
We came to the Absaloms. A row of cottages sunk into the damp of the lane. Mother and I had lived at Number One. It was derelict now, and should have no power to hurt me, but I never came by here if I could help it. Only today, with the child, because it was the quickest route to the Hall. ‘See those walls? They’re called the Absaloms. They were cottages once. I used to live in the end one.’
‘It’s got no roof!’
‘It did have. The others didn’t. They were already ruins.’
‘Can we play in those ruins?’ Pamela said.
‘Not today.’
I dismounted at the beginning of the drive to the Hall. The potholes were now deadly. It was hard skirting them with Pamela on the back of the bicycle. I whistled under the trees to keep our spirits up, and eventually we reached the old dairy which was alive with the chip of metal on stone.
‘Hello, young’un,’ said a familiar sunburnt face of forty or thereabouts, quizzing us through a rough new gap in the bricks. It was William Kennet, who gardened for Lady Brock. When he wasn’t turning over the grounds to food crops he was busy with Home Guard duties – in this case, fitting the old dairy out with gunsights. So many things, these days, had to be seen to be believed.
‘Morning, Ellen,’ he said. ‘Who’ve you got there?’
‘Morning, Mr Kennet. Sergeant Kennet, I beg your pardon. This is a little girl from Southampton.’ I spoke meaningfully, and he gave a slow nod. ‘Say hello, Pamela!’ I used my brightest tone.
Pamela waved from her perch but said nothing. Her face was pinched. I was hungry, so I knew she must be too.
‘What are you doing?’ she asked William.
‘Giving this old wall a few holes,’ he told her. ‘To make a nice breeze in the dairy.’
‘It must be awfully difficult with that bad hand.’
‘Oh Pamela, that’s not polite.’
William smiled, held out the hand to her. ‘Look, it holds a chisel right well. So I can hammer away with my hammer.’ He made a claw, to show her. His thumb and finger were huge beside hers, calloused and bent from overuse. Behind the finger was a single nub of a third finger, and then nothing. What remained of the palm and back of the hand was bound by scar tissue, now silvered and braided. It was a creation of a shell, during the Great War, at the Battle of Messines. He was a copper-beater before that shell screeched over, a high craftsman, but I never knew him as such. To me he was a gardener, with a potting shed that was a refuge throughout my later childhood, a charcoal stove that was the only warm thing in my life.
Pamela, awed, was mimicking him, trying to make her own claw, her small perfect little forefinger sliding off the soft top of her thumb. ‘Mummy’s still in Southampton,’ she confided to him. ‘But she’s coming to fetch me this afternoon. Do you know, we saw a house with no roof!’
‘Did you now?’ He raised his eyebrows at her. ‘That’s not a lot of use, is it? A house with no roof. Now, Upton Hall certainly has a roof, and a tower too. Wait till you see it.’ He glanced at the bicycle. ‘I’m glad you found a use for that old sheepskin.’
‘It’s not old. It’s lovely. I used to sleep on it when I was tiny.’
‘I know.’ He gave me his square grin. ‘It was me that gave it you, when you were newborn.’
‘Oh, William, how very kind!’ I was astonished. ‘I never knew! I would have thanked you for it long since!’
He shrugged, still smiling. ‘It was a cold winter, and I had it to spare. And your ma and pa thanked me on your behalf, very civilly.’
‘I keep forgetting that you worked for my father.’
‘You were too young to remember. And I wouldn’t call it work. More like a day here and there.’ Mr Kennet tipped his hat with the remains of his right hand. ‘Now, I can’t linger, my dear. Come and have a cuppa when you get time.’
‘I’ll try,’ I said, wondering when I would ever get time.
Lady Brock opened her front door, boots spattered and mackintosh hemmed with mud.
‘Good morning, Ellen. How do you like our defences? Have a care, William Kennet will soon be asking you for the password of the day.’ She came down the steps. ‘I saw you, skirting the quagmires. Sometimes I’m glad Michael’s no longer with us, you know. He wouldn’t have minded the ploughing –’ she indicated, with a wide sweep of her arm, the great pathwayed allotment of ragged, nutritious brassicas and rich, black potato furrows which had replaced her lawns and rose garden ‘– but he’d have loathed the drive. We only needed a few ruts for him to say it looked like bloody St Eloi.’ She turned to Pamela. ‘I do beg your pardon, dear, for my foul language.’
After the Great War Lady Brock’s husband, Sir Michael, had been an ambulant if rather wheezy hero; over the next twenty years the gas had reduced him by increments to a gurgling wraith in a bath chair before killing him in September 1939, ten days into the present war. Lady Brock as usual had a gorgeous rich red on her wide, rather fish-like mouth. The lipstick, plus a feathered hat and a shy, rarely seen beast of a fur coat, constituted all she had of glamour. On the day of Sir Michael’s death, which had been by internal drowning,