The Skylarks' War Read online

  ‘Grey,’ remarked Mrs Morgan, hacking at a cabbage with a blunt knife. ‘Grey and patchy it looks! Piled up with dust! Go on!’

  ‘An exquisite crescent of pale light in the western sky . . .’

  ‘Exquisite, indeed!’ said Mrs Morgan. ‘Washed out, more like. Always looks washed out to me, does the moon. Like that father of yours!’

  ‘Father? Washed out?’

  ‘Fearful, you might call it,’ said Mrs Morgan. ‘Afraid of the world. When he snaps at you, that’s just his fear coming out. Now don’t you stare at me like that, madam! I’ve made up my mind to say a few words and I’m telling you for your own comfort. So as you don’t let him upset you so often as he does.’

  Clarry turned her face away.

  ‘Now, my father,’ said Mrs Morgan, sweeping a heap of cabbage into her saucepan and beginning on another pile of wrinkled green leaves, ‘took a belt to me! Regular!’

  ‘A belt!’ exclaimed Clarry, horrified. ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, for what I got up to. Cheeking him. Climbing out of my bedroom window to go off with the boys. Going away with his horse to get to the fair. Took it out of the shafts of the cart, I did, while my father stood outside the cottage and never noticed till I’d gone! Too busy staring at the chimney!’

  ‘What was the matter with the chimney?’

  ‘It was afire,’ said Mrs Morgan placidly. ‘I was bound I’d get to the fair that year, so I’d stoked up the hearth good and hot inside, and put on a bundle of straw. I’d missed the fair the time before, you see. I was out all night, and me only fourteen! What a performance when I got back the next day!’

  Clarry gazed at Mrs Morgan in complete admiration, all her troubles forgotten.

  ‘Oh, he was a very determined man, my father!’ said Mrs Morgan, nodding. ‘But yours is a gentleman, whatever his temper. Is that enough greens?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Clarry, who was not fond of cabbage. ‘Thank you, Mrs Morgan.’

  1912

  THREE

  Journey to Summer

  It was strange how Mrs Morgan’s remarks about fathers helped Clarry. She did not completely agree with them, and she could not help wondering how hot-tempered her own father would have become if she had behaved anything like Mrs Morgan had as a girl. Still, it was comforting to know that other people had difficult relations too.

  There were other reasons for cheerfulness in Clarry’s world. The long, cold winter was passing. The light grew brighter, even in the Miss Pinkses’ fume-filled classrooms. The air was wet and salt-tanged from the sea. There were birds above the chimney pots and daffodils to be spotted on Miss Vane’s chilly walks, and it was spring, with summer on the horizon.

  Summer was shining bliss. Summer was opals and topaz and lapis and diamonds flung down from the sky. Summer was Cornwall.

  Every summer they were there, for weeks and weeks, for an endless time, for so long that when they were little they forgot that one day they would have to go home. There was never a day of winter that Clarry did not count as one day closer to summer. When the time before leaving for Cornwall could be counted in days rather than weeks, there was no sadness that could touch her. At the beginning, when she and Peter were very small, their father had been forced to travel with them, but since Peter was ten they had been judged old enough to manage the journey alone. They were dispatched at one end by their father, and collected four or five hours later at the other by whichever grandparent happened to be about. When Miss Vane first heard of this careless arrangement, she had been so horrified she offered to take them herself.

  ‘Er . . .’ their father had said. ‘Why? What could happen to them?’

  Miss Vane suggested missed stations, robbery and kidnapping. Unmoved, the children’s father said he generally gave a shilling or two to the guard, and so far this had not happened. That was no guarantee of the future, said Miss Vane.

  ‘Er . . .’ said the children’s father, and, most unusually, asked Peter’s opinion.

  ‘What?’ cried Peter in horror, and added that he would rather be robbed, kidnapped and walk the whole distance, than sit in a railway carriage with Miss Vane all the way to Cornwall. Clarry, hovering anxiously on one foot in the background, did not disagree.

  ‘Well, er . . .’ said their father. ‘Very well. As I thought.’

  So the children continued to travel alone, unrobbed, unkidnapped and correctly delivered.

  The summer that Peter was thirteen and Clarry was nearly ten, things were different. As the date for departure came closer, happiness fizzed in bright bubbles through Clarry’s days and nights, but it was not the same for Peter. There was a tension in the air between Peter and his father that made any mention of the future a perilous thing. Cornwall was never the pure joy for Peter that it was for Clarry, anyway. For a start, there was the journey to be got through. This began, every time, with the parting at the station and their father’s annual summer speech, made always in jerky sentences, with his pipe clamped in his teeth.

  ‘It’s very good of your grandparents . . . every summer . . . Make an effort, for heaven’s sake, not to be . . . trouble to them . . .’

  Peter’s expression was entirely blank, but his eyes rolled sideways.

  ‘We’re never trouble,’ Clarry assured her father. ‘They hardly see us most days. And we do help. Last year we mowed the grass quite often, and posted letters and things.’

  ‘Er . . . good. Excellent. Oh, Clarry, your birthday . . .’

  Clarry blushed with embarrassment. He had remembered. Sometimes he didn’t. Sometimes he did. She never knew whether to be glad or sorry, but she was always ashamed.

  ‘To celebrate.’

  A coin in her hand. Small, but heavy. Ominous.

  ‘Oh no, oh no! Father, you needn’t! It doesn’t matter.’

  She and her mother had overlapped each other in time for only a very short while. Less than a week. Three days. How could any birthday be celebrated if that was the case?

  ‘Choose a treat!’

  ‘Oh, thank you, thank you, but . . .’

  Clarry looked around for help from Peter and found he had vanished. Far down the tracks appeared a great cloud of steam. The platform stirred like a rock pool at the turn of the tide. It was the moment of farewell.

  Clarry’s father took his pipe from his mouth. He dipped his head. Clarry kissed a patch of air somewhere near his left ear. His hand touched her shoulder briefly. They both sighed with relief and the racket of the arriving train shook them into their separate worlds again.

  ‘Here we are, then. Where’s your brother?’

  Peter was back, shaking hands with his father (anything to avoid the horror of a hug), clutching his bag, rigid.

  ‘Postcard,’ said their father, pipe in place, straightening his shoulders as if putting down a load.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ said Peter impatiently.

  ‘Might you come and see us?’ asked Clarry. ‘You could, couldn’t you? Perhaps?’

  ‘Er . . . well . . . no. Now then, off you go.’

  Their bags were on the train, heaved up by Peter with their father hovering behind.

  ‘Behave, and so on!’

  ‘Don’t be lonely!’ said Clarry, leaning out of the window. She caught a glimpse of his face, unguarded, and saw that he could not wait for them to go.

  Oh, Father. Oh, thank goodness, the guard was beginning to pace the length of the train, closing carriages. On the platform, a crowd of people surged between them. The doors slammed. There was a pause of quietness and then a shrill whistle, an eruption of noise, a great deal of steam, a smell in the air like winter fires in summer, and the train was moving.

  At the last moment, Clarry stretched out of the window to scream, ‘I love you! I do love you!’

  ‘Sit down!’ growled Peter, but Clarry waved until the station was out of sight. Then she retreated to a seat opposite her brother and unclamped her fingers from her birthday present.

  It was a gold sovereign, the first she had
ever held. Clarry gasped out loud and Peter glanced over.

  ‘For my birthday,’ Clarry told him. ‘He remembered.’

  Peter refrained from saying, I reminded him.

  ‘Do you think he can afford it?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I’ll give you half.’

  ‘No thanks. I’ve got money.’

  Unlike Clarry, Peter had a godfather. A useful one too. He lived in Scotland and did not communicate in any way, but on the first Monday of every month he sent to Peter a postal order for five shillings. On the first Tuesday of every month Peter posted back to him a message of thanks on a postcard: Thank you very much. P. Penrose.

  It was like, Clarry sometimes thought, having a very small private gold mine.

  But postal orders were only printed paper. This was actual gold. Heavy. The king on one side. St George and his dragon on the other. Clarry bent to study it. The dragon was not yet slain. It was putting up a good fight. One twist, and it could slip aside, spin round and come at St George from behind. The sovereign was such a thing of beauty to Clarry that she thought she might keep it forever. The next minute, though, she had begun a list of all that it might buy. What was Peter’s heart’s desire? What would make her father smile? What would please her cousin Rupert?

  The future sparkled with possibilities, and the sun came out and illuminated the carriage’s stale, grey air. Soot, and pollen, and the dust of humanity that rose in clouds from the itchy horsehair seats, all glittered as if newly enchanted.

  Could Peter see the glimmering air? Clarry looked across at him.

  No. He couldn’t. He couldn’t see anything. His eyes were clenched tight shut, his face was white, his hands gripped together into a bunch of knobbly knuckles. He was fighting a battle. Peter suffered from travel sickness. The journey to Cornwall was nearly four hours long.

  ‘Peter,’ whispered Clarry.

  ‘Shut up.’

  ‘We’re nearly halfway through the first hour already.’

  He gave a small moan.

  Clarry had with her a secret store of strong brown-paper bags supplied by Miss Vane. She had six. Last year she had brought two, which had not been enough.

  ‘Drop them discreetly from the window after use,’ Miss Vane had instructed. Clarry had dropped them, but not discreetly. ‘Discreetly’ was not easy with other people in the carriage. Another problem was that the bags had to be invisible until the moment of crisis. It was fatal for Peter to catch sight of them a second too soon. It was all very difficult indeed: the bag-hiding, the swift producing at the critical moment, the scarlet-cheeked endurance of their indignant fellow passengers while the bags were in use, the collection, the wobbly steps across the carriage, the one-handed tugging down of the window, the drop.

  I must be careful not to let go of my sovereign by mistake, thought Clarry suddenly, and that was such a dreadful idea that she jumped up to stow it away.

  ‘What are you doing?’ hissed Peter as she climbed on the seat beside him to retrieve her case from the saggy string luggage rack overhead.

  ‘I’m putting my money in the little pocket in my case,’ whispered Clarry. ‘I won’t get it down. I just need to get the strap off . . .’

  ‘You’re bouncing the seat!’

  ‘Sorry! Wait!’

  ‘Stop it,’ moaned Peter. ‘Oh no! Oh no!’

  Clarry glanced down and dropped both open case and sovereign as she leaped to the rescue. A cascade of clothes tumbled on to the floor, together with Clarry’s beloved paint box; the sovereign went rolling away, but she managed to push the bag into Peter’s hands before the worst happened.

  ‘Phew!’ said Clarry.

  ‘Well done!’ cried a grinning youth from the seats opposite.

  ‘Good girl!’ agreed an elderly man, smiling with approval, and lifted his toe to show her the sovereign, caught before it rolled out of sight. A thin, bright-faced woman was already collecting and folding the tumbled clothes.

  ‘Happens to the best of us,’ she said, passing them to Clarry, and there was a murmur of agreement that changed to loud polite conversation about the view from the window, while Peter suffered again, although as privately as he could manage.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Clarry, overwhelmed by all this kindness. ‘Thank you . . . He can’t help it. He’ll be better soon and, anyway, I have five more bags . . .’

  ‘Shut up!’ moaned Peter, bending again, but after a few ghastly moments he was well enough to ignore Clarry’s helpful hand and stagger to the window.

  ‘There you go!’ said the grinning youth, who yanked it down for him and afterwards gave him his seat. ‘Better facing forward,’ he said, and this turned out to be true. So they got through the rest of the journey with three bags to spare, and it was all worth it, because at the end was Cornwall.

  Summer 1912

  FOUR

  Rupert

  Cornwall was theirs for the summer, and the best part of all – better than the turquoise sea, the white gulls and the gold-and-purple moor; better than the tangled garden, the scutter of rabbits in the early morning and their dark footprints in the silver dew; better than the bounty of the Cornish kitchen (apple dumplings, brown eggs, saffron cake and raspberry tart); better even than Lucy, their grandmother’s pony who pulled the pony trap – was that in Cornwall was Rupert. Their cousin, Rupert. Rupe. Nearly seven years older than Clarry, three and a half years older than Peter. Their fathers were brothers. Clarry and Peter had never met Rupert’s parents, last seen waving to three-year-old Rupert from the boat train, now (according to Grandfather) living in Calcutta, avoiding their responsibilities. Rupert spent his holidays in Cornwall and term-times away at boarding school. Having endured the desertion of his parents, a Cornish winter when a gale was so strong it blew him off the cliff, a Christmas of scarlet fever and innumerable years of compulsory education, he was assumed to be indestructible and allowed to do what he liked.

  Rupert had a curving smile and lazy green-gold eyes, completely unlike Peter’s wary grey glance. His jokes were the best, his tennis balls flew the highest, his stories charmed the most listeners, cats strolled over and sat beside him, dogs regarded him with comradely affection, the sunlight tanned him apricot-gold and rain rolled off him in silver drops. He was recklessly kind. For Clarry he was the centre of summer, the light on the water, the warmth in the wind, the welcome-back song of the bee-humming moor.

  Rupert was on the station platform when they arrived, and a moment later Clarry had jumped down to be swept into her annual hug of greeting. Rupert hugged Peter too, which Clarry was never allowed to do.

  ‘Get off,’ said Peter grumpily. He considered himself far too old for hugs, and he was not feeling very fond of his cousin that summer. In the last few weeks, his father’s mutters and hints had resolved into a family conspiracy to send him away to school – to Rupert’s boarding school, which, as their grandparents had pointed out to Peter, had been ‘the making of his cousin’.

  ‘I don’t need “making”!’ Peter had protested, but his father clearly thought he was wrong. He had actually invited him for a walk to talk over the matter, the longest conversation he had ever attempted with his son. Peter had been marched up and down windy streets, listening to the tale of how Rupert had begun school as a miserable seven-year-old and become, through the influence of education, the successful and confident person he was now.

  ‘I’m not going and you can’t make me,’ Peter had said, every time he had a chance to speak. These words had had the good effect of making his father walk twice as fast, and at a speed where it was impossible to talk. Unfortunately, as soon as he calmed down a little, he began once more.

  ‘I’m not going and you can’t make me,’ Peter had repeated mutinously in the next available pause, and off they would go again. This continued for nearly two hours, and then quite suddenly Peter’s father had spun round, turned into a side street and, without another glance, vanished.

  Peter had arrived home to find
Clarry alone in the house, hovering by the front door and worrying.

  ‘Where is Father?’

  ‘Who cares?’ asked Peter, pushing past her and stomping inside.

  ‘What did he want?’

  ‘To get rid of me.’ Peter marched up the stairs to his bedroom, and slammed the door very hard.

  He had been in a slamming mood ever since, ignoring his father, snubbing Clarry, hunched and miserable on the train. He blamed at least half of his boarding-school troubles on his cousin, who had survived far too long and well. Now here was Rupert himself, behaving as if it were none of his fault.

  ‘Sick much?’ asked Rupert kindly, ignoring Peter’s growls.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Three bags,’ said Clarry cheerfully. ‘None on the floor this time. Who’s coming to meet us?’

  ‘Grandfather,’ said Rupert, as he led the way out of the station. ‘But we have to wait for a bit. He dropped me off and went on into town. He’ll be back in a few minutes to collect you.’

  ‘Is he all right?’ asked Clarry. ‘And are Grandmother and Lucy?’

  ‘Of course they are.’

  ‘And are you, as well?’

  ‘Don’t I look all right?’ asked Rupert.

  Clarry nodded, not wanting to say anything that would make Peter even more cross, but her eyes shone so brightly she might as well have spoken.

  ‘You should just stay here in Cornwall with Rupert if you like him so much,’ said Peter, sour with jealousy. ‘I don’t suppose Father would care.’

  ‘You would, though!’ said Rupert, laughing. ‘You couldn’t manage without Clarry! What about if I come and live at your house instead?’

  ‘Could you?’ asked Clarry.

  ‘Of course. You wait and see. I’ll turn up one day and bash on the door, and you’ll all hide behind the curtains and pretend to be out, like Grandmother does when the vicar’s wife comes round.’