Great Meadow (10 page)

‘Because,' I said, with my breath drifting out round me
like fog, ‘because it smells of bindie. That's why. So don't pick it up.'

Flora looked pinched, but she just shrugged. ‘I don't know what you mean. I think you are being horrid and making me feel daft because I'm Scots! Well I am and I don't. Feel silly, I mean. I don't know what your old bindie means so I'll just go on picking it up. So there.'

‘It smells like
dog's
bindie,' hissed my sister.

Flora went quite white. She dropped some sticks and looked worried. ‘What's bindie for goodness' sake? What's that?'

My sister started to drag the wooding-sack through the snow across the little churchyard where we were looking for the kindling among the ash and the elms. ‘It's what dogs do in the street. Not at lamp-posts, that's just widdle. Bindie is much worse.
Much
worse. And that's what elderberry wood smells of.'

Flora screamed suddenly, her Tarn o'Shanter went tilty, and she beat her hands against her coat.

‘It's everywhere! I can smell it! It's terrible! My coat is ruined. Oh dearie me –'

‘No need to deary-you. It only smells like it in the fire. That's all. I mean, there isn't any bindie actually
on
the twigs . . . '

But she covered her ears up and started to scramble down the path to the gate. ‘You
are
awful! Awful! I feel sick. I'll go and tell on you two . . . '

I watched her sliding and stumbling down the hill. But we had work to do.

‘Let her go. Good riddance,' said my sister. ‘So silly about a little bit of bindie. Goodness. Anyway, she gets in
the way. We can do it quicker together because we know what is and what isn't. After we've got the milk, will you come to Baker's with me? There is a dear little matchbox there with a whole fishing-kit inside. It's only a penny. How much have you got?'

Two pennies,' I said, stuffing some sticks into the sack, having shaken off all the snow and frost.

‘Oh good!' said my sister. ‘So you can buy one too. There's a little round thing with a funny mouse in it, and you have to get the glass balls into its eyes. It's a penny too. You'll love that.'

The next day was pretty good because there was a thaw in the night, so that made it all right for our father and mother to be on time. I mean the O.M. would be able to get up the lane. So we all went out, well wrapped up with scarves and Wellingtons and gloves and everything, and stamped about at the end of the muddy lane between 2 o'clock and 3 o'clock, as our father had promised to be there, and Mrs Daukes kept running down her path and said we'd all perish from the cold but she never asked us to come into her parlour and that was because Mr Daukes was probably still unconscious with his bad head and bandages everywhere. So Lally said. And then, just as it was beginning to get dusk, because we had got past the shortest day, we saw the headlights, the little ones, of the O.M. as it turned left at Piggy Corner and started to climb up the hill. It was exactly ten past three, and we all started cheering and waving, except silly Flora. She had just about got over her sulking on account of the bindie-wood business, but didn't know about cheering her father and mother
because she only had a father and he wasn't worth cheering for anyway.

And then the huffle and bustle, the kissing and laughing, and our mother looking so pretty all wrapped up in the big moleskin travelling-rug, with her leather helmet and huge great goggles. Our father always drove with the hood folded away. It was a ‘sports car', he said, so it was suitable. But our mother didn't very much like getting her hair all blown everywhere, so that's why she had to wear the helmet, like my father. Hers was brown and his black, and they had gauntlet gloves and all the luggage was in the big box strapped at the back. Minnehaha was in his basket with the wire front, under the tonneau cover at the back, and I was told to carry him up first and let him have a sniff round the sitting-room, locked in, while we all unloaded the car and got our mother safely up to the house. She was a bit wobbly from the drive, and from not being very strong after her fall down the stairs.

But Lally steadied her up the path and we all helped carry the parcels and cases. Just as it got really dark and my father started to cover the car for the night by putting up the hood and slotting in the isinglass windows (I had to help, and it was a jolly cold and fiddly job, I can tell you), I said, very politely, ‘Where is the tree, Papa?'

He straightened up and put his hands to his mouth and said, ‘Oh! My god!', which was pretty awful, but he looked so worried that I pretended I hadn't heard what he said and just went on talking and screwing the things that held the windows down.

‘I know the goose is there – Lally said it was a “giant of a bird” – and there was the box of crackers, because I saw the name in wriggly writing, but there isn't a tree.'

And there wasn't, and our mother was quite amused when we told her and said it really didn't matter, we'd do without a tree this year because there had been so many problems for our father to worry about. He just forgot it, and it wouldn't have fitted into the car anyway. We had Minnehaha, crackers, the goose, even the pudding from October, and we had
them
, safe and sound. So that seemed reasonable, and Lally brought in the tea and a big dish of buttery crumpets with a lid on, and so I just forgot the tree. Well, sort of.

Minnehaha had almost settled down by this time, of course. He was pretty old, and he knew the cottage, and so he just went poking about here and there, sniffing, and in the end he jumped up on my father's lap and sat looking about him, his ears rather flat to his head. Flora said, ‘I think he's scenting your wee mice in the cage. Cats have a wonderful sense of smell, that's how they find their prey.'

I really did want to give her a bonk on the nose, but Lally gave me one of her looks, and I just shrugged, and Lally said the mice were miles away in the lean-to, on a high shelf, and that Minnehaha was too old to ‘caper about mousing'. It was kind of her, but I wasn't altogether certain. I didn't like the flat ears bit. But, of course, he
could
just have been listening for strange sounds after our house in Hampstead. His tail was twitching slowly, and I felt a bit worried. But I
did
want to bonk Flora for putting the idea into his head.

The lean-to was a bit cold. It had a tin roof and wooden walls, and no curtains or anything at the windows to keep out the draughts. But the Weekend seemed all right up on its shelf, and I'd given them a good chunk of fresh apple,
some corn and a big fistful of hay for their bedding. There was a good smell everywhere of not only onions and paraffin, but creosote and turpentine. There were sacks of potatoes, a big row of marrows, jars of gooseberries and greengages, rows of our father's painting things and canvases stacked in a corner, and a line of stone jars full of ginger beer and parsnip wine which our mother ‘put up' at the end of every summer. I liked the lean-to very much. It was sort of outside the house but inside the house at the same time, because if you opened one door you were in the garden, and the other one opened right into the kitchen with the glowing range and the copper and all the dishes and pots and pans. It was really very decent.

We didn't have Christmas stockings now that we were more grown up. So even though I woke up early, even before Lally, because you could see there was no light round her door, there wasn't much point in being awake because of no Christmas stocking, which was a bit sad. I remembered feeling it in the dark, the nuts in the toe, the tangerine a bit squashy if you weren't careful, the interesting rustling of paper and the liquorice-strap (that was easy to tell by being flat
and
round), and the cracker wagging about at the top. It was pretty exciting, but now there was no stocking and no tree. I just hoped there were presents of some sort. I had asked for a theatre from Mr Pollock's shop in Hoxton, but I didn't suppose our father had had the time to go there, not if he forgot the tree.

So I went to sleep again, and only woke up when Lally gave me a push and said, ‘Happy Christmas, and you, Miss Fernackerpan! Wake up! It's Christmas morning and
your parents' tea to get. Bonnie Caledonia! Wake up! Happy Christmas!' And carrying her candlestick and her indoor shoes, she went off down the stairs. She was so bossy and busy that you just
had
to get up, and this morning there was no wooding to do, so we had to wash our faces and hands first off. We each had a bowl and a jug of freezing water, and a big slop pail, and shared the soap. So it was all a bit of a muddle, except the girls got dressed while I washed, and then I gave Flora the Lifebuoy, and then my sister took it. We poured the bowls into the slop bucket and I had to carry it down and empty it in the drain outside the lean-to.

In the kitchen, kettles were boiling, the goose was on the table looking very white and dead beside a carrier bag from MacFisheries. Lally said, don't touch, because it was full of innards and she needed them and we'd have to manage best we could about breakfast and clear ourselves places because she was up to her eyes. Anyway, we had boiled eggs, no porridge today, and toast and rhubarb and ginger jam.

Then we all had to go down to the Court to get the milk and some cream. Our mother came down to see how we all were, and get another cup of tea and make the stuffing for the MacFisheries goose. She looked pretty in her kimono with a huge gold dragon on the back, and when I asked where our father was she just shook her head and said she really didn't know. I was pretty sure she really did but wasn't saying. So we went down to the Court, not down Great Meadow, because it was all muddy and boggy and my sister said there were some cows down in the corner and Flora said she was scared witless of cows.
But I didn't take much notice of that because she was witless anyway, so how could she be scared out of something she hadn't got? We walked, sploshed really, down the lane, and the chalky water was gurgling and spilling down the ruts because of the thaw, and there was no sound except for our sloshing and the water burbling.

‘You'd think the world had stopped just because it's Christmas Day. It feels so funny,' said Flora, who was pretty funny herself.

The dairy at the Court was very interesting because it was half underground and half not, so that it would never get warm even in the very hottest summer. And it never did. There were little ferns growing along under the big slate shelves where the bowls of buttermilk and whey, skimmed, and ‘Today's' and ‘Yesterday's' stood. Everything was usually covered in muslin because of the flies from the yard, only, not today, because it was so cold even the ferns had gone all limp. But Miss Barbara Aleford was fussing about the very moment we pushed open the door. Inside it smelled lovely and damp, earthy and then sweet from the milk, and she was pouring a big crock of new milk into the bowls with ‘Today's' on them.

‘Heigh ho! Heigh ho!' she cried loudly and set the big crock down with a crack on the slate shelf. ‘Happy Christmas! Wonderful day! See you've got your cans with you and that doesn't leave me to guess you need some delicious new milk from my animals. Got it right?'

I said that was right and gave her the cans.

‘Today's or Yesterday's? All the same to me. In this cold Yesterday's will do you just as well and you can come down tomorrow and get some Today's. Capital!'

She was quite tall, with earphone things curled round the side of her head, and men's corduroy breeches and canvas gaiters, and Lally once said that she was a poor soul who was grieving for her fiancé who had gone missing in the war. But she was still waiting for him because, at any old time, she told Lally, he'd just turn up. He knew the way like the back of his hand, and his pipe and baccy pouch were still in the front parlour where he'd left them.

It was a bit difficult to think of Miss Barbara with a fiancé, and waiting so long in those awful breeches, and her big red hands and earphones and all, when perhaps the fiancé had just gone away somewhere. Like our grandfather who, our mother said, suddenly hop-skipped it off to South America without so much as a by-your-leave or even a kiss to his wife, and just never came back. Wrote some letters but never came back. Just went off. Perhaps our grandmother had got into a bit of a huff. People did do that and it could make you very disagreeable. My sister did it sometimes, and sometimes Lally.

Miss Barbara was ladling the Yesterday's into the milk cans and humming under her breath. ‘Bring your white mice again? Remember last summer and the harvest mice? Terrible that was! You got so upset . . .'

I remembered the harvest mice all right. I'd brought them back to the farm from the gleaning and they'd jumped out of my pocket and Miss Barbara had trodden on one in her huge old boots and killed it dead. So of course, I got upset, anyone would. Silly woman. So that's why I bought Sat and Sun in a pet shop in Lewes, to make up for it. Being dead, I mean. I said yes, they were in the lean-to and very well, thank you, and she ladled the milk
and said that Mrs Daukes, up the top, had told her that my mother was not so well, on account of she had a nasty fall down the stairs not long ago . . . and how sorry she was if she'd lost it . . . and then she went quite red in the face and told me not to mind. Which I didn't. Grown-ups are very peculiar sometimes. Really . . .