Contents
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Helen Dunmore
Title Page
Epigraph
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Acknowledgements
Read on for an extract from Birdcage Walk
Copyright
Cornwall, 1920
A young man stands looking out to sea.
Behind him the horror of the trenches, and the most intense relationship of his life.
Ahead of him the terrible unforeseen consequences of a lie.
Helen Dunmore was an award-winning novelist, children’s author and poet who will be remembered for the depth and breadth of her fiction. Rich and intricate, yet narrated with a deceptive simplicity that made all of her work accessible and heartfelt, her writing stood out for the fluidity and lyricism of her prose, and her extraordinary ability to capture the presence of the past.
Her first novel, Zennor in Darkness, explored the events which led D. H. Lawrence to be expelled from Cornwall on suspicion of spying, and won the McKitterick Prize. Her third novel, A Spell of Winter, won the inaugural Orange Prize for Fiction in 1996, and she went on to become a Sunday Times bestseller with The Siege, which was described by Antony Beevor as a ‘world-class novel’ and was shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel of the Year and the Orange Prize. Published in 2010, her eleventh novel, The Betrayal, was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and shortlisted for the Orwell Prize and the Commonwealth Writers Prize, and The Lie in 2014 was shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction and the 2015 RSL Ondaatje Prize.
Her final novel, Birdcage Walk, deals with legacy and recognition – what writers, especially women writers, can expect to leave behind them – and was described by the Observer as ‘the finest novel Helen Dunmore has written’.
Helen was known to be an inspirational and generous author, championing emerging voices and other established authors. She also gave a large amount of her time to supporting literature, independent bookshops all over the UK, and arts organisations across the world. She died in June 2017.
If any question why we died
Tell them, because our fathers lied.
Rudyard Kipling
The epigraphs to Chapters 1 to 17 and 20 are drawn from material produced by the Army Printing and Stationery Services during the period of the First World War, including Notes for Infantry Officers on Trench Warfare, March 1916, and Notes on Minor Enterprises, March 1916. Notes on Minor Enterprises is reproduced in a volume of First World War pamphlets and publications, An Officer’s Manual of the Western Front 1914–1918, edited by Dr Stephen Bull.
I have also drawn on Hand Grenades: A Handbook on Rifle and Hand Grenades, compiled and illustrated by Major Graham M. Ainslie, 1917.
Other epigraphs are from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
The poem extracts, in order of appearance, are taken from:
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
‘The West Country Damosel’s Complaint’, Anon., traditional (When will you marry me, William . . .)
‘Invictus’, by William Ernest Henley (Out of the night that covers me, / Black as the Pit from pole to pole . . .)
‘When We Two Parted’, by Lord George Gordon Byron
‘Peace’, by Henry Vaughan (My soul, there is a country / Far beyond the stars . . .)
‘The Destruction of Sennacherib’, by Lord George Gordon Byron (The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold . . .)
‘Dover Beach’, by Matthew Arnold (The sea is calm tonight . . .)
‘There Was an Old Man Called Michael Finnegan’, Anon., traditional
Zennor in Darkness
Burning Bright
A Spell of Winter
Talking to the Dead
Your Blue-Eyed Boy
With Your Crooked Heart
The Siege
Mourning Ruby
House of Orphans
Counting the Stars
The Betrayal
The Greatcoat
The use of veils and coats of a colour to match the background is useful. If near sandbags, an empty sandbag worn over the head is a good disguise. Against an earth background a brown gauze veil, against grass a green one are both difficult to detect. Grass, weeds, wood or branches may give concealment.
HE COMES TO me, clagged in mud from head to foot. A mud statue, but a breathing one. The breath whistles in and out of him. He stands at my bed-end. Even when the wind is banging over the roof that I’ve bodged with corrugated iron, it’s very quiet. He doesn’t speak. Sometimes I wish that he would break the silence, but then I’m afraid of what he might say. I can smell the mud. You never forget the reek of it. Thick, almost oily, full of shit and rotten flesh, cordite and chloride of lime. He has got himself coated all over with it. He’s camouflaged. He might be anything, but I know who he is.
I light my candle and get out of bed, because I know I won’t sleep again. The wind bangs, and behind it I hear the sea booming at the base of the cliffs. It’s night, but I can still work. I light my lantern and get out needle and thread from the sewing box Mary Pascoe left to me. My trousers want patching. They are good, heavy corduroy, worn thin at the knees. I may not be nimble at sewing, but I can get the job done. They want leather patches but I haven’t got leather, so I use cloth from inside the pockets. I sew the patches all around, as firm and as neat as may be. I look at my work and then I go round again until I am sure that the patches will hold.
When I look up out of the dazzle of stitches, he’s gone. At the foot of my bed there’s nothing but the heavy pine box with Mary Pascoe’s initials burned into it. The box was black with smoke, but I’ve scoured it.
I think about how he comes. Does he displace the box? Is he in it, or is it in him? I shouldn’t think of it. It makes my mind dazzle, like my eyes.
Tomorrow I’ll plant main-crop potatoes. I’ve prepared the ground. In October, soon after I came here, I dug the earth deeply and then covered it with rotted seaweed from the pile that Mary Pascoe carried up from the shore, when she was still able. She said that seaweed made the potatoes grow clean of disease. My seed potatoes lie ready in their trays, sprouting. The sprouts are strong.
Frederick. I can say his name aloud now, without danger. He won’t come again tonight. I have thought that if he ever came by day, I’d take him to the horse-trough in the next field and wash him until white flesh appeared. Or he could stand by the stream while I poured water over him, bucket after bucket. It would be like taking new potatoes out of the soil. But I know that he’d be back again the next night, with the mud still on him. It never dries or forms a crust. It is always wet and shining, like the eyes of a rat in the back of a dugout. He’s been out there in the wind and rain, rain sluicing over him, turning the land to mud that can drown you.
A man stuck in the mud can’t free himself. He needs two men to help him. You lay a piece of wood down on either side of him. You work him out, one boot at a time. It’s a slow job. Often there isn’t time and you have to leave him. Usually it’s not that the mud is so deep. It doesn’t come above his knees but he can’t free himself, and if he loses his balance and tips forward, he will drown. You hear the cries of men caught like that. But that was later. Frederick died before the worst of the mud.
I have a calendar on my wall and I mark off the days. I keep records of how many rows I’ve planted: early potatoes, turnips, carrots, beetroot, spring cabbages and all the rest. This mild spring has made the earth soft and ready. I’ve planted gooseberry bushes, because they’ll stand the wind. Mary Pascoe made hedging around her vegetable patch. She didn’t look after her cottage: she stuffed her windows with rags and let birds nest in the chimney, but she always knew how to make her bit of land feed her. She left me the cottage and the land around it, which maybe never belonged to her at all, but which she’d made her own. Why shouldn’t she have her bit of land, my mother used to say, when there’s others that own half the county? Mary Pascoe left me her goat and her chickens. She used to keep a pig, she said, but I don’t remember that.
I knew her more than the other children did, because of my mother’s friendship for her. I’d see her striding into town, with a basket of eggs on a strap. Sometimes, Frederick and I met her on the shore, picking mussels, when we were walking out to Senara or beyond. Me and Frederick, side by side, swinging out. We had bread and cheese in our pockets, and he might have brought chocolate, or a handful of plums. He shared between us so easily that you couldn’t tell what was his and what was mine. I never met anyone else who had that gift, until I was in the army. We had poetry books, or rather Frederick brought them from his father’s library, and I read them. Frederick was going to be a lawyer. He’d stayed on at school, gone upcountry to Truro for his education, and then farther still to boarding school.
I left school when I was eleven, a year before I ought to have done, but in the circumstances a blind eye was turned. My mother needed my wages. She had no other family to provide for her. For years, when I was a child, she went out to clean in the big houses: Lezard House, four or five of the houses along The Row, Carrick House in the summer season, when the family that owned it were down from London. When I was ten she had rheumatic fever, and after that she hadn’t the strength for cleaning. She was soon out of breath walking uphill, no matter how slowly she went. Sometimes she had to lean on me. I hated it. I’d like to think I gave her my arm willingly, but the truth is that her weakness frightened me, and made me ashamed of us, the two of us, when I wanted to be proud. Bolts of shame would go through me as we struggled up the hill, like flies in milk.
I remember how I knelt on the bare boards of the bedroom, on the night my mother was so ill that she didn’t know I was in the room. I’d never known her not to come to me at the lightest sound, if I woke from a bad dream. But now she didn’t know me. Her eyes went beyond me. She was talking all the time, in a low quick mutter, but not to me. I heard my father’s name and my grandmother’s. She cried out for them once, her voice rusty and tearing, and she tried to heave herself off the pillow, but Mrs Jelbert held her. I sank down to the floor, and pressed my face into the quilt. All the prayers I’d ever been taught jumbled in my mouth.
‘You go on downstairs, boy,’ said Mrs Jelbert, but I couldn’t. ‘Don’t you fear, my chiel. We’ll slock ’er round.’ I was beyond believing her. A black wind of terror blew through me and I prayed for my mother until sweat trickled down my back. No one answered me, nothing spoke.
Mrs Jelbert sent a boy for Dr Sanders. He came that night, and stayed until morning. He refused to let her die, even though it was clear that she had left us in her mind. She was with those other ones, those ghosts I’d barely known but who called her more strongly than my own voice could call her. But Dr Sanders wouldn’t let her stay with them. He bent over her, hauling her back, hurting her I thought from the way she cried out.
I’m not sure that my mother ever came back again, truly, but she was good at pretending. She got better. All through, Dr Sanders treated her for nothing, and afterwards he bestirred himself to find work for me, and settled it with school that I was to leave early. I was taken on as gardener’s boy at Mulla House, two miles’ walk from the town.
‘You’re the man of the house now, Daniel,’ Dr Sanders said to me.
The doctor called me Daniel in deference to my mother’s wish, although most people called me Dan. She always said, ‘Daniel is his christened name.’ It may seem strange that a doctor whose house my mother cleaned should show her this respect, but it was a fact. My mother was always someone you wanted to please. She was dark-eyed and dark-haired and her face was made so that you had to turn and look at it again, to see what it was that had struck you so. Even I felt it, and I was her son. It was anguish to me when other people looked at her. One of the artists who came to the town wanted to paint her, but she wouldn’t even answer him. I can see her now, drawing her shawl around her face, turning away. She was a widow. What she had left was her good name. The artist wouldn’t take no for an answer, and annoyed her more by saying that she had ‘the most spiritual regard he had ever seen, outside Italy’. Spiritual! She was hungry. We were both hungry, in the years after my father died.
I was three years old when he was killed. He was leading Brittan’s cart on a steep downhill, with a brake on the wheel. The brake slipped and gave way, the cart came down on the horse which stumbled and plunged so that my father was flung sideways against a wall. Even then it wouldn’t have been serious, but a protrusion of granite caught his temple. He was twenty-two, barely a year older than I am now. My mother was twenty. There was no insurance.
Soon it will be light. Nothing visits me in the daylight. There’s only the wind soughing, the wrinkling of the sea even on the quietest days. I dig, and mend the chicken wire. The cottage and the land are mine now. Mary Pascoe’s nanny goat, her ten chickens, the midden, the little stream that barely grows wider than a child could step over, the clean, difficult land, full of stones. She grew too old to tend them. Her eyes were milky and had lost the wildness that scared us when we were children, but she still knew me when I came along the path with my pack. She said, ‘Is that you, Daniel Branwell?’ and I said yes. Then she said, ‘Come in, my chiel.’
That was the first time I ever heard of anyone going inside Mary Pascoe’s cottage. It was full of smoke, and the walls were black with it. The house and everything in it was kippered. I coughed until my eyes watered, but she seemed untroubled. There were other smells, of age and sickness and the two cats that she used to keep, which twined around her legs and gave her the reputation of a witch. I’d always known that she was no such thing. The cats are dead now. My mother used to visit her, taking a bunch of yellow roses from our yard, the flowers no bigger than buttons but sweet-smelling. They talked on the threshold, never inside the house. I was jealous of those visits.
Mary Pascoe gave me a cup of sage tea. She knew that I’d been in France but she asked nothing about it. ‘Where are you living now, Daniel?’ she asked me. She also knew that our cottage had gone back to the landlord, because there was no one to pay the rent.
‘Here and there,’ I said. I asked her if I might make a shelter from corrugated iron and canvas, on the edge of her land. She nodded. She told me where the spring was, and that I should dig myself a latrine. She had no doubt I’d know how to do it, having been in the army. Neither had she any hesitation in mentioning such things.
‘Come in when you want a warm,’ she said. She’d made the sage tea in her black kettle, and even that tasted of smoke. She moved surely, feeling for things. I wondered how much sight she had left.
‘I went to see your mother before she died,’ she said. I started as if electricity had gone through me. By the time I’d come home, my mother was already in the grave we’d visited together every Sunday throughout my childhood: my father’s grave. The wind used to pucker up the grass, and the sun shone on her hair as she knelt to tidy and tend. Below us, the sea glittered. I never remember it raining: perhaps she only took me there on fine days. She would talk about him sometimes. That’s how I learned most of what I know about my father.
When I came back, the grave was narrower than I remembered it. I couldn’t see how there would be space for me there, as well as them. I wanted to know what my mother had said and how she’d looked before she died, but no one would tell me. The doctor said she died peacefully. I didn’t believe a word of it.
‘I found some buds on that rose of hers, and put them in her hand,’ said Mary Pascoe. She said nothing more on the subject, then or ever. She stirred the sage tea and said that it could do with sweetening. Even with her milky eyes she still seemed more like a bird than a woman. We used to call her a buzzard when her cloak flapped in the wind. Now she was hunched and silent. I was glad that the humanness in her seemed to have been parched away, so that she was light enough to fly.
That was five months ago. She never ventured as far as my shelter. I dug myself a latrine pit, and boiled water from the stream. I knew it was pure enough, but I had army habits now. I dug a trench around the back of my shelter, to carry away the winter rains. I had money. My mother had saved as much as she could from the pay I sent her. She put it away in the tobacco tin that belonged to my father. If she hadn’t saved it, she would have been warmer and better fed, but the doctor said it would have made no difference. The valves of her heart were damaged by the rheumatic fever she had when I was a boy, and it was her heart that killed her.
I never went into town. I would walk to Tremellan, or Senara. On market days I walked as far as Simonstown, to be there when prices dropped at the end of the day. I fed Mary Pascoe’s hens for her and soon I was taking care of them entirely. She said I should have the eggs, because she couldn’t stomach them now. She still drank the goat’s milk, but there was plenty of that for both of us. I remember when she used to make goat’s cheeses, wrap them in nettles and sell them, but such things were beyond her now. All the time, I was thinking about how the land could be used. She had been famous for her vegetables once. The sweetest and earliest potatoes came from Mary Pascoe’s patch. She grew white lilies and sold them in the church square. But now, the hill was taking her land back to itself. Much of her hedging had disappeared. The fencing around the chicken run was in poor condition. Bracken, furze and briars were swallowing her land, and stones were breeding in it like rabbits. I began to clear it. Of course I knew that I would be observed. This is my country. I know how many eyes it has.
On the afternoon of January the fourteenth I heard her calling to me, her voice high and wild. She was like a curlew, I thought, because I was still trying to put a name to the kind of bird she was. I ducked my head and went into the black cottage.
She lay in her nest of rags. She looked up at me, but her eyes were now skeined over with milk, and completely sightless. She wanted water, so I fetched her a cup and held it while she drank. She was hot. I took her wrist and felt her pulse, which was rapid but light as a thread. I’d seen the doctor do this with my mother.
‘Shall I fetch the doctor?’ I asked, but she moved her head from side to side: no. I saw that she was gathering her strength to speak. I gave her more water and told her I’d mended the fence of the chicken run. I was glad, really, that she didn’t want the doctor. He would come, and then more people would come after him. She was gathering herself for an immense effort. She took more water, coughed, and then said, ‘I want to lie here, not under a stone in the town. You’ll do that for me, Daniel.’
When I say that she said this, I mean that she brought it out between deep, harsh breaths, and twice a coughing fit stopped her. I was afraid she would die saying it. There was sweat all over her face.
‘You’ll stay here after me, Daniel,’ she said. I nodded, then remembered that she couldn’t see me, and said: ‘I will.’ It was enough for me, to hear her say that. After this she was exhausted and slept for a while. I stayed with her because I was afraid that if I went back to my work she might be too weak to call me. The fire was nearly out, so I put more wood on it. Smoke was better for her than cold. Outside, the light was going, and it began to rain. I thought of the pliers I’d left outside, at the chicken run, but they would still be there tomorrow and I could oil them before they had a chance to rust. She opened her eyes and looked about blindly. I thought she wanted more water and I held the cup to her lips, but she moved her head away.
‘Is it Daniel?’ she asked. I nodded, then remembered she couldn’t see me and said, ‘Yes, it’s Daniel.’ It seemed as if she were searching my face, and then looking to my side and beyond me. I knew that she could see nothing. She said, ‘Who have you brought with you?’
Dead, disposal of: Bodies of dead men will be taken right away from the trenches to be buried.
It will frequently happen that substantial buildings are found close to the selected line of defence. The question then arises whether to occupy them or to demolish them.
I BURIED HER at the very edge of her land, at its highest point. I knew what she wanted, and there was no sense in waiting. If my mother had been alive, I would have gone to tell her, but I couldn’t think of anyone else in the town who would want to come to Mary Pascoe’s burial. Or would have any right to come. I dug down, always expecting to strike a shelf of granite, but the soil was deep enough. I dug her a decent grave, and lined it with dry brown bracken and branches of the rosemary bush that grew close to her door. I wrapped her in a piece of the army canvas that I hadn’t needed for my shelter. The smell of her was bad when I lifted her, like a bird that you find crawling with lice and maggots after it has gone away to die in the foot of a hedge. But I didn’t mind it. I had worked all day on her grave and I was sweating in spite of the cold. After the burial and the infilling of her grave, I stamped the earth down to settle it. I rolled a granite boulder to the head of the grave. I knew how quickly green would cover the turned earth.
The stream was running full after the heavy rains we’d had. I filled a bucket, took it to the outhouse where the goat was tethered, and stripped off my clothes. I thought that every pore of my body would be black with dirt, but my skin was white where my clothes had covered it. My hands and wrists, neck and face still held the tan of exposure. I washed myself with household soap, and when I was finished I sluiced the bucket over my head and over my entire body, until I was shaking with cold. I had one full change of clothes, and I put them on. That was when it came to me that I wouldn’t sleep in my shelter that night. I would sleep in the cottage.
I told no one about Mary Pascoe’s death. At first I didn’t know who to tell. She never went near church or chapel. The people who used to visit her to buy vegetables, eggs or goat’s milk had fallen away. My mother was her friend, perhaps, but I couldn’t think of another. If I told the doctor, he’d say that I should have called him. He would have come, I’m sure, because he was known for treating those who couldn’t afford to pay him, while he took his guineas from the big houses. There was nothing he could have done to help her. Mary didn’t want him anyway. She wanted to die under her own hedge. She’d have feared the workhouse most, because it’s said that if you die there, your body is taken for dissection. I don’t think Dr Sanders would have sent her to the workhouse, but some busybody in the parish might have thought it a duty to have her conveyed to the infirmary.
After a few days it was too late to tell anyone. She had lived indoors for long enough that she wouldn’t be missed. I couldn’t remember the last time she had walked into town.
The cottage was my first task. I had to get the smell out of it. I opened the door wide, but the two windows that fronted the cottage had cracked or broken panes, and their wooden frames were rotten. I pulled out the rags with which Mary Pascoe had stuffed the broken panes, and examined the glass and wood carefully. I could bodge the sills. In time I could buy new panes of glass, and putty. For now I replaced the rags, and left the windows as they were.
The chimney wanted sweeping. I would do this first, so that the soot could fall and be cleaned away with the rest of the dirt. I had Mary Pascoe’s broom, and an old ladder with rungs that didn’t look rotten. The ground at the back of the cottage was higher than at the front. I scythed and trampled down the brambles that hooked from the hillside to the cottage wall, set down the ladder and tested it. I was well hidden. I grasped the side of the ladder with my right hand, and the broom in my left, and mounted the rungs to the top. First I cleared the guttering, which was packed with moss and rubbish. I needed to get higher, on to the roof itself. The slates had fallen away in parts and the roof had been patched with corrugated iron, rusted now. I would patch it further.
I tested the guttering with my hand and it held firm. Besides, it wasn’t so far to fall. From the top of the ladder I could push myself up, twist sideways and get my foot into the guttering, but I had to be sure that, having climbed, I could get down again. I thought that I could.
It was easier than it looked. The guttering cupped my foot as I spreadeagled myself on the roof, and pushed upwards. The corrugated iron gave me another foothold, and then I was there, grasping the ridge piece, and in another moment I was astride. I was strong, I knew it, with the life I’d had, two years of it, and then the miles I walked each day and the ground I dug. The chimney was squat. I grasped it and looked out.
I seemed many miles higher, rather than the fifteen feet or so that I had climbed. I gripped the roof between my thighs as if I were riding a horse. There was the brown, bare, sinewy land running down to the cliffs. There were the Garracks, and Giant’s Cap, and the Island. There was the swell, like a muscle under the sea, moving in long, slow pulses to Porthgwyn. I looked west and saw rainclouds, damson-coloured and making a bloom of shadow on the sea. It was a cold, still day and eastward the land humped and widened from the lighthouse to St Anne’s Head.
I looked towards the grey huddle of the town. My eyes began to hurt, and I turned away. I must sweep the chimney. I didn’t want anyone who might be working on the land or walking the paths to see me up on the roof. I got hold of my broom, awkwardly because of the angle, then gripped it lower down the shaft and plunged it into the chimney.
It wouldn’t go down cleanly. I poked and prodded. I twisted the handle round so that the broom would drill itself down into the darkness. The rain was coming closer and I didn’t want to clamber down from the roof when the slates were slippery with wet. I felt the broom grating, grinding almost, as if against something more solid than a bird’s nest.
It broke through. The broom brushed against the sides and then dabbed into the void. It was as much as I could do, and my arm ached with the effort of raising the broom and plunging it up and down. I lifted it for the last time, black and thick with muck, and threw it down the roof, clear of the gutter to the ground. I cursed myself for not having thought of chicken wire. I could have brought some up with me, and covered the chimney top to keep birds out.
It was raining hard by the time I’d climbed down and put away the ladder. I went into the cottage, thinking of shelter, but the filth drove me outside again. It seemed impossible that so much dirt had come down one chimney. I took breaths of the rainy air, then forced myself back inside.
Crushed and broken birds’ nests lay in the fireplace, some of them caught on the chain where the kettle hung. On the grate lay a mess of white bones and feathers. Soot was caked and lumped all around, and a finer, sticky coating covered floor, furniture, walls. She must have burned coal for years, in the days when she was strong enough to push her handcart down to town. Later, she’d burned wood and furze and anything that came to hand.
I touched the table and my hand came away black. I couldn’t think where to begin. For the first time I thought of leaving the cottage, dismantling my shelter, packing up the canvas and making my way to another place. I didn’t know where.
I needed hot water to scrub away the filth, but until I could light a fire there would be no hot water. I didn’t want to make a fire outside. It’s the kind of thing that draws attention.
Very well then. I took the broom and washed it in the stream, until the water ran black. I brought it in, wet as it was, and began to sweep out the wide, craggy granite fireplace. Time after time I washed the broom, swept, washed the broom again. I was wet with sweat, and glad of the coolness each time I went out into the rain. It fell so thick now that it had blurred into a mist, wiping out coast and town.
The tethered goat was noisy in the outhouse. I had forgotten to milk her. I washed my hands again, up to the elbows, and went in to her. She was agitated, rolling her yellow eyes at me and kicking out, but I knew how to deal with her and she was used to me now. She ought to have been pegged out at the far end of the land, but I had left her in all day. I milked her and drank some of the milk. There was a tang of wild garlic in it, from the bundle of greenstuff I’d brought in to her that morning. I couldn’t remember why it was that I hadn’t pegged her out. She was calmer now.
I lit the fire. The chimney drew the flames straight up, pulling them like ropes. The wood was blackthorn and the fire burned clear, after the first smokiness of damp. I sat back on my heels and opened my body to the heat, then after a minute I remembered what I had to do and why I had lit the fire. The kettle was dirty, so I washed it inside and out, filled it from the stream, hooked it to the chain and swung it over the hottest part of the fire. I would fill the kettle over and over, and scrub the floors, the walls and even the ceiling until they were clean. I would scrub down the deal table, the two chairs, the bedstead and the box. The bedding I had already buried, and I would drag the mattress out into the air to purify it. I had my own blanket to sleep in.
It took all the rest of the day, and most of the night. I worked by candlelight because I had no oil for the lamp. I thought that people might see the warm light flickering in the windows, so I drew the curtains across. I had beaten the dirt out of them, and would wash them on a warmer day. My nose and mouth were full of the acrid reek of soot, but I didn’t mind. The scrubbing brush was worn down almost to the wood by the time I had finished. I couldn’t sleep on that mattress, so I rolled myself in my blanket in front of the fire, and slept, slept until the birds woke me.
In the light of day, it was another matter. I hadn’t cleaned the house as well as I thought, and there was more to do. I found washing soda, packed hard, under the stone sink, and remembered how my mother dissolved it in hot water and scrubbed with her red, raw hands. The washing soda cleaned much better than the household soap had done. The rain had been followed by strong wind and clouds that chased the sun, and I dragged out the mattress and humped it over the barrow. There were stains on the ticking but I scrubbed them away. I would leave it out all day and night, if there was no rain.
I forgot to eat all that day, but I remembered the goat and pegged her out, and when I milked her I drank the milk again.
By nightfall everything was clean. The wind had dropped and it was cold, with the stars swimming above the sea. Venus was so bright she seemed to dance around the moon. I made myself tea with the last pinch I had in my pack, and drank it so thick and black that it made my heart jump. I was very tired. I stood in the doorway of the cottage with the cleanness of it behind me, and the fire still burning, and looked down at the sea. There was almost no moonlight, because the moon was the thinnest crescent, but there was enough starlight to see the black shapes of the rocks. Tomorrow I would clean out the earth closet. I would need to walk to Simonstown anyway, to buy tea and seed, and I would buy Jeyes Fluid there.
At last I went back inside the cottage and closed the door. I had only one candle burning, but it was enough. The kettle sang on the fire. I would wash myself in warm water tonight, at the sink.
I wrapped myself in my blanket, and lay down by the fire. The floor was hard but I was used to sleeping on earth. I thought of the mattress, with the cold night air washing over it. I wrapped my arms around my body and tucked my head down, ready to sleep.
That was when the smell came to me. It was not the old smell of the cottage, not dirty rags or sickness, not soot or the muck I had scraped off the floor. That had all gone. This was a new smell, and an old one too, so familiar that as it touched my throat I gagged.
It was the smell of earth. Not clean earth, turned up by the spade or the fork, to be sunned and watered. This earth had nothing to do with growth. It was raw and slimy, blown apart in great clods, churned to greasy, liquid mud that sucked down men or horses. It was earth that should have stayed deep and hidden, but was exposed in all its filth, corrosive, eating away at the bodies that had to live in it. It breathed into me from its wet mouth.
I rolled myself into a ball. I put my hands over my face, the hands that I’d washed in warm water and soap, but still they stank of earth.
There is an insidious tendency to lapse into a passive and lethargic attitude, against which officers of all ranks have to be on their guard, and the fostering of the offensive spirit, under such unfavourable conditions, calls for incessant attention.
TODAY THE SUN shone as if it were June and not the end of March. I mended the chicken run, sowed beetroot seed and planted the onion sets. I laid broken eggshells around the young lettuces to keep off the slugs. I have put in three rows of carrots, two of turnips. There is a bristle of green over the black earth. Everything is orderly. I hoed out the weeds, and opened and turned the compost heap.
I have some money left. I feel the weight of the tin where I keep my coins. I know there are florins, some sixpences, a few joeys and a heap of copper. I saw a woman selling bunches of primroses in Turk Street, and it came to me that I could do the same. There are more violets in the hedge-banks this year than I ever remember. You have to set them off with leaves, fasten them with a wrap of thread, then douse their heads upside down in cold water so that they are fresh for morning. There I’d be in Turk Street, with violets spread in a wooden tray covered with damp moss. You could sell a bunch for threepence I’m sure.
There’d be people I knew among the market-day crowds. I’d have to speak to them.
The best thing I’ve bought with my money, apart from vegetable seeds, is the fishing line I use to catch mackerel off the rocks. The fish come in close, nosing for rot. I let down the baited line stealthily, and if the water’s clear enough I glimpse the iridescence of the mackerel, twitching under the rocks before they rush for the hooks. Mackerel is a strong fish. Its colour changes quickly in death, and it never tastes as good as when it’s first out of the sea. I split the fish down the belly, gut them and cook them within the hour, so that their flesh is white and clean. I keep a few strips back to use as bait. Mackerel are like crabs, which will scramble over themselves to eat their own kind.
I drink milk at midday, and eat the heel of a loaf. The sea shines like pewter. I squat down out of the wind, and smell the wild garlic. I know everything that can be eaten, for five square miles around. Mussels on the rocks, samphire growing around the estuary in season, spider crabs and wild strawberries, blackberries, elderberries, bread and cheese from the hawthorn, new dandelion leaves for salad, chervil, nettles for soup in spring. But it would be a lie to say there was ever enough to do more than blunt our hunger, or flavour the soup my mother made from a handful of bones, potatoes, a parsnip or two, a couple of carrots. Every child in the parish was out after the blackberries, and although I knew the best places, we didn’t always have enough sugar to preserve them.
Once Frederick and I milked a cow, secretly, in one of the small fields set with loggans, up beyond Senara towards Bass Head. It was one of those wild little cows they keep there, and it backed off from us, lowering its head and digging its front hooves into the pasture. But slowly, with the two of us chirruping and gentling, we came on, one from each side. Frederick flashed me a triumphant smile as the cow stood still at last, trembling, and let us touch her. I knew how to milk, well enough, and we filled our cupped hands and gulped it down, warm and frothy in our mouths. The farmer would have tanned the hide off us. Frederick said it was a pity we hadn’t a pail. We drank and drank, and then we heard a yell and two big lads erupted over the gate. They must have been the farmer’s sons. We ran like hell until they stopped chasing us, then we flopped down by a stream. I saw that there was brooklime growing, which Frederick had never tasted. He said it was bitter, and spat it out.
‘Why do you eat that muck?’
‘It cleans the blood.’
He rolled on his back, laughing. Frederick ate meat every day, once if not twice or three times. They had eggs and bacon for breakfast every morning, and kidneys in a dish. His father ate chops, with Worcester sauce, but no one else was allowed them. His father was a mining engineer who had gone out to Australia, not as thousands of other poor men went, in search of work, but to introduce a new type of winding gear. Mr Dennis took his payment in shares in the mines he worked on. Frederick explained to me how that was better than money. Sometimes he drew a blank, but even so he sailed home three or four times richer than he’d been before. Or richer still, maybe; no one ever knew. He married, and then he built a square granite house surrounded by a high granite wall. It wasn’t beautiful, but it would stand for ever. Frederick was going to be educated at the Cathedral School in Truro. But when Frederick was four and his sister Felicia two, their mother became pregnant for the third time. She died of puerperal fever, and the baby died a fortnight after her.
This was how I came to know Frederick. My mother cleaned for the family, and Mrs Dennis had grown fond of her, as people did. After Frederick’s mother died, and his father took to work as he might have taken to drink, my mother looked after the children more and more. I might have been jealous, but my mother always had me along with her. I learned the world of Albert House. There was Mrs Stevens who came in to cook, and there was Annie Noble who cleaned now that my mother was so taken up with the two little children. It was the best job my mother ever had, and it lasted three years. I ate at the Dennises’ table with Frederick and Felicia, and I grew until I was the tallest boy in my infant class. If either Frederick or Felicia was ill, my mother would stay all night, and a little bed would be put up for me in the slip-room by the nursery.
I make it sound as if everything fitted together. My mother, me, Frederick, Felicia. Mr Dennis mostly a voice behind a closed door, or a pair of long black legs scissoring across the hall as we watched from the top of the stairs. But once he came close.
Felicia had cried all night with the toothache. My mother was to take her over to Simonstown, to the dentist. I had never been to a dentist and I wondered why Felicia cried harder at the news. She was bundled in her coat and hat with a scarf tied around her face, and they went off in the dog cart. Frederick had his handwriting to practise. It was a disgrace, now that he was almost seven. It was high time Frederick was taken in hand.
It was Mr Dennis who said that. His voice was loud through the study door. He had to stay up until the early hours of the morning, my mother said, because of his business. Other black legs, not only Mr Dennis’s, scissored to and fro, and bundles of documents lay piled on the hall chest.
Frederick was in the schoolroom, on the first floor. I was there too, lying on my stomach on the rug. I was reading ‘The Fisherman and His Wife’, out of Felicia’s Grimm’s Fairy Tales. The fisherman was stupid, and so was his wife, I thought. They didn’t listen to what the sea was telling them. You had to do that. I finished the story and then kicked my heels in the air and thought about whether the whole world could be drowned, if the sea grew angry enough. Frederick wasn’t doing his handwriting. He was singing to himself and drawing in the margins.
We both heard the heavy steps in the corridor. Loud, strong footsteps, meant to be heard. The door handle went round. The door opened and there was Mr Dennis, all of him, tall, whiskery, in black from head to foot. He wasn’t looking at me, but at Frederick. I shuffled back on my knees, towards the curtain. I knew Mr Dennis mustn’t notice me. He threw a glance around the room, unseeing, scorching. I felt it run over me without stopping and I was glad. Mr Dennis strode to the table and picked up Frederick’s book. It was covered with little drawings: that was what Frederick always did.
‘What’s this?’ he asked.
Frederick looked up at him. ‘It’s my handwriting book,’ he said.
‘How dare you answer me like that? What’s this diabolical mess you’ve made in it?’
Frederick dropped his head, and said nothing.
‘Answer me!’
‘It’s my handwriting book.’
‘Handwriting book!’ Mr Dennis picked up the book and threw it across the room. ‘It looks like it. You’re as stupid as you’re idle. Now fetch it.’
I was almost in the curtains now. I felt the cold trickle of winter coming through the glass behind me. I wriggled back. Frederick got up from the table, and went laggingly across to where the book lay on the floor. He glanced at his father before stooping to pick it up, as if he didn’t want to turn his back on him.
‘Bring it here,’ said Mr Dennis. Frederick held out the book to him, and Mr Dennis snatched it and hurled it again, hard, into the corner of the room.
‘Fetch it!’ he said, as if Frederick was a dog, and again, even more slowly, Frederick did so. A third time, Mr Dennis shied the battered book across the room. This time he said nothing, but jerked his head at the book, for Frederick to get it. But Frederick didn’t move. Mr Dennis’s glance went round the room again, and he saw me cowering in the curtains.