‘Mummy, he’s in Aden! Isn’t that the foulest luck? To be sent abroad just when it’s all over, when even Daddy’s home! Oh, I could scream.’
Anna was sitting on the edge of the kitchen table reading the latest letter from Dan while her mother cleaned lettuce, radishes and potatoes for their evening meal. Anna had managed to arrange a ‘forty-eight’, only three weeks after her father’s homecoming and had been in a celebratory mood until she had opened Dan’s letter. The fact that he had been posted was bad enough, but he would be in Aden for a whole year. It seemed intensely unfair.
‘Never mind, love. You said yourself that you’re probably in for a further twelve months,’ Constance said comfortingly. ‘And Anna, darling, I’ve been meaning to tell you … Daddy seems different.’
‘Different? How d’you mean? He looks pretty good, all things considered.’
It was a fine September evening. The sun’s long rays
lit the kitchen at Goldenstone, while outside in the garden JJ dug a trench for the asparagus crowns he intended to plant. Anna laid her letter down and peered out at him. Naval shirtsleeves rolled up, thinning hair hanging over his face, he was digging with what looked like great enthusiasm.
‘He
is
pretty good. But that spell in hospital after his ship went down seems to have sobered him up. He was quite ill, you know, he couldn’t even write a letter for six weeks. But I’ve taken him to see the family, we’ve been to a couple of parties … and, darling, he hardly looks at other women! He’s been sweet to me, absolutely sweet. So I do think it’s all going to work out.’
‘That’s marvellous,’ Anna said sincerely. ‘Poor Mummy, you deserve a break from all that worry. It’s good to know I can think of you two as Darby and Joan.’
Constance turned from the sink to pull a face. ‘Darby and Joan! Oh well, I suppose I’ll have to settle for that and forget being a bright young thing. Daddy is over forty, but I’m not exactly in my dotage, you know.’
‘I didn’t mean … I just meant a happily married couple,’ Anna said, confused. ‘Anyway, so long as you won’t …’
‘Perish the thought!’ Constance said quickly. ‘Darling, would it be asking too much if I said would you please forget all that – that other business? I trod the straight and narrow from that moment on, well, almost, and I certainly don’t intend to … Daddy’s my
life
, you know that.’
‘Yes, of course I do. Daddy and Jamie,’ Anna said. ‘How is my baby brother, by the way?’
‘He’s gone camping with the scouts, which worries me to death, but I’ll just have to get used to it, I suppose. He’s never going to get to university or anything of that nature, but then I’m not at all academic myself. He’s making his way in the world very nicely apart from that.’
‘Daddy isn’t academic either,’ Anna said thoughtfully. ‘But actually, Mummy, you’re going to have to face up to the fact that I need a career. I’ve been happy in the WAAF, but I don’t want to stay once they say I can be demobbed. So – so I’ve applied for a place at university, to read economics.’
‘
You
? Darling, how awfully brave of you, but why economics? Why not something a bit more feminine, like … like …’
‘You can’t get a degree in ballroom dancing or embroidery,’ Anna said, trying to keep a straight face and failing dismally. She crossed the room and gave her mother a quick hug. ‘Mummy, you never change! Remember, if I want to marry, I shall – I shan’t be short of offers. And I think I will, but in my own time and to the right man. So don’t worry about me, because I don’t intend to be a bluestocking who puts men off by being cleverer than they are. I did all right at school, you know, so there’s no reason I shouldn’t do all right at university.’
‘I’m sure you’ll do very well,’ Constance said loyally. There was a short pause. ‘Have you told Daddy yet?’
‘I haven’t told him yet. I thought I’d rather you knew first,’ Anna said, and understood why her mother gave a muffled little sob and flung her arms around her daughter’s neck, giving her the most fervent embrace the two had ever exchanged.
‘Thank you,’ Constance whispered. ‘You’re a lovely daughter, Anna!’
Dan read Nell’s painful, tear-blotched epistle with disbelief and flung it down with a short laugh. She didn’t mean a word of it, that was for sure, she was just peeved because he’d been sent abroad. As if he could help it!
Aden was a pretty grim spot and Dan couldn’t help wondering whether he could swing a transfer if he showed
the letter to the right people. Weren’t there special postings for men whose women kicked over the traces, or was that just talk? But a little thought, and a good deal of poring over the now sweat-blotched pages, convinced Dan that his best hope was to write back, lovingly and understandingly, and tell her that he hoped she would not cut him out of her life but would continue to write as a friend. Cunningly keeping the channel of communication open, he would bide his time, wait until he was back in Blighty and then find out what it was all about.
She had said something about having a talk with her mother; he wondered whether Hester had put the boot in and, if so, why? He guessed his Uncle Geraint had been carrying on with Hester because it was Uncle Geraint’s way; his mother had said so and she should have known. His mother, he knew, had been close to Uncle Geraint and it had gone further than mere friendship, whatever she might pretend. As a boy of ten he had been sick in the middle of the night shortly after their arrival at Pengarth and had gone seeking his mother, tearfully, uncomfortable in his vomit-streaked pyjamas. He had gone to her room and it had been empty. He had trailed, hiccuping and miserable, down the wide staircase, into the moonlit hall. The drawing-room was empty, the little study, the sewing-room. Upstairs again, he had looked around him uneasily, wondering what had happened. Had all the grown-ups fled the country? What was he to do? Then he remembered Uncle Geraint and the room over the gatehouse. He had set off, still in his sticky pyjamas, across the yard and up the outside stair.
A line of light showed under the door and he tapped gently. Too gently as it turned out, since there was no answer to his knock. He knocked again, louder, and heard scuffling sounds behind the wood.
He was a polite little boy. He had waited, shivering, and the door had opened.
Uncle Geraint stood there. He looked hot and bothered, and his hair, that thick greying hair, stood on end.
‘It’s the boy,’ he said over his shoulder. ‘What’s the matter, Daniel?’
‘I’ve been sick,’ Dan croaked. ‘I feel ever so bad, Uncle. And I c-can’t find Mummy.’
‘Oh, she’s gone … look, old boy, go back to your room and I’ll fetch her. She’ll be with you in five minutes, I promise.’
Dan had trotted obediently back to his room, but he had not been fooled. Mummy had been in there, with Uncle Geraint; he had smelt the faint perfume of roses she always wore. He felt that bad things had been happening, but when Mummy came to him, flustered and pink-cheeked, she said she’d been in the kitchen making herself a cup of cocoa to help her to sleep, and, poor darling, he must get into her bed for the rest of the night since his sheets were stained. She had helped him to change his pyjamas, popped him, cleanly clad, into her own bed, and then settled on the couch with a blanket over her so that if he woke again she would be near at hand.
‘They were Doing It,’ Dan had concluded in later years, when he was more knowing. Fancy my pretty little mother playing about with that old horror! But it hadn’t bothered him really. He liked Uncle Geraint and perhaps he’d had hopes of the two of them marrying so that he and Mummy could stay at Pengarth for ever. But it had all ended and they had moved on.
He remembered now, with real gratitude, those ill-penned but lively letters which had plopped down on the breakfast table at school from the little girl called Nell whose mother had taken her far from Pengarth. He had been unable to reply because she had never given him an address, but the letters had been like a strong rope, linking him to all the things he liked most, and he had clung to it for years, until his mother had taken him
away from school and the rope had been broken.
Perhaps she went on writing the letters, but if she had, the school hadn’t forwarded them. A shame really, and too bad, but it hadn’t mattered because they’d met again.
Now she was trying to break the relationship; well, she wouldn’t do it. He loved her, wanted her, would marry her no matter what anyone said. Immediately, before she could do anything foolish, he would write and tell her that she must not act precipitately, and that however she felt, he would always be her true friend. He would tell her how much her letters had meant to him at boarding school all those years ago, and beg her not to desert him now, when he was stuck in this hell-hole, with prickly heat, malaria and dysentery threatening.
Dan reached for the pad of blue writing paper which his mother had given him in the hope that it would encourage him to write to her often. The tip of his tongue poked out in concentration and a lock of jet-black, gleaming hair fell forward over his brow.
Above the young man’s head the little brown monkeys which infested the RAF camp dived amongst the rafters, squeaking, chasing one another, occasionally dropping down and seizing anything which wasn’t nailed down. They were famous thieves and gave the men hours of amusement; in their turn, the monkeys got hours of amusement from the tanned, shorts-clad young men, who behaved very oddly, not at all as the Arabs behaved.
The monkeys saw the man stop scratching on the blue paper with his piece of stick and fold the paper. And then he dropped his head on his arms, and his shoulders shook. There was wetness on his brown hands and some of the drops fell on the blue paper and made dark, wrinkly spots.
Nell had spent the day hunting for frogspawn, because her landlady’s daughter, a real little townie, had said the
previous day, over high tea, that she had never seen a tadpole, let alone a frog.
‘Good God, you must have,’ Nell had protested, shocked that any child could be so deprived. She remembered expeditions at Pengarth when she, her mother and Matthew – she no longer thought of him as her father – had gone down to the flat, marshy meadows which divided the mountains from the coast, to root around in the ditches and small ponds for frogspawn which they would fish carefully out of their natural element and place in large, water-filled jars. They stood the jars in the middle of the kitchen table and, each day as they ate, the wonder of metamorphosis took place before their eyes. Tiny blobs of jelly gradually formed into big-headed, narrow-tailed tadpoles and these, in their turn, grew little legs, shed their baby softness, dropped their tails and lo! they were frogs.
And here it was at the end of February 1946 Amy Pratt could look her in the eye and assure her that she had never seen a live frog.
‘I’ll get you some spawn,’ Nell had promised, recklessly considering that she was not familiar with the countryside around Tunbridge Wells. For all she knew, frogs might never spawn around here. But it was all right. She walked a long way, it was true, but at last she came to fenny, boggy land surrounded by small copses and ponds and, despite the fact that it was very cold, she forced her way through the tall, frost-whitened reeds and filled the bucket she had brought, first with pond-water, then with weed and, lastly, with a few blobs of frogspawn.
Nell was in Tunbridge Wells with her new fair – Marushka’s – which over-wintered here and toured Kent and Sussex during the spring and summer. She had not intended to work the fairs again; after working on the land for so long she wanted to try for a job which paid reasonably well and allowed her to settle in one spot. A
fair, she thought, would be a retrograde step; she needed more interesting work to take her mind off Dan. But getting a job was not easy. She had been right when she told Fleur that all the good jobs would go to the soldiers, sailors and airmen who were being demobbed. Girls were not even being considered for agricultural work, not with the men streaming back home, so despite her best efforts Nell was hard-pressed to find a job she liked and could do well.
At last she got work in a grocer’s shop, and found that she spent most of the day counting coupons and points. It was incredibly boring, so she tried a bicycle repair place, but that was worse. Men did the repairs; all she had to do was write down what was wrong with the bikes and see that the work was done in the order the bicycles had been left. After that she moved to London, where she sold tickets in a theatre, but the money was bad and lodgings expensive. Then she moved down to Slough and worked in a factory which made towels for export, but she hated factory work, loathed being cooped up all day.
She tried being a groom at a big stables. That was all right until the head lad decided he liked her and assumed she also liked him; when he cornered her in the tack-room she punched him so hard that she broke his nose. She guessed he would have it in for her in future and walked out at the end of the week. Nell had a half-hearted look at other flattie employment, but there was a greyness and an exhaustion about ordinary people in the streets which made her long for the racy, take-as-it-comes life on the gaff. She found she was missing fair folk, the comradeship, the constant movement around the countryside.
She had received a letter from Snip who had been involved in a grisly accident and still wasn’t home, so she wasn’t likely to bump into him on a tober somewhere, and her pain and misery over Dan had retreated to no more than a dull ache in the back of her mind. Time
was beginning its healing process; she had loved and lost, now she must take up life in earnest once more. Then, when she was staying with Cissie and Fleur over Christmas, she saw an advert in the
Fairground Mercury
for a conjuror’s assistant:
MUST BE DARK-HAIRED, PRETTY, COOL-HEADED AND WILLING TO HOLD STILL
. Tickled by the turn of phrase, Nell went along to be interviewed.
The conjuror, who called himself Giovanni, though his real name was Ted Smith, was a dapper, dark-haired little man with a magnificent moustache, the ends of which were waxed to needle-like sharpness. His hair was receding, his eyes protruded slightly, and at first sight he was not a commanding figure, but within a week of starting work Nell realised her new boss was a brilliant illusionist.