The Wooden Shepherdess (27 page)

“Listen: you've got to look on Hitler's ‘tiny following' more like the first few cases of plague than as any normal minority.”

Reinhold had done his damnedest to carry his case but had failed to convince the more experienced Count. For the Count was older, and steeped in national politics all his life: he was bound to look on his witty young friend as a bit of an amateur—coming from Munich moreover, and seeing his every Bavarian goose as a swan. A Prussian himself, at the back of Lepowski's mind remained the undeniable fact that the master-folk were the Prussians. The Reich was a “Federal” State, but Prussia was twice the size of all these former petty kingdoms and princedoms and duchies rolled into one; and national politics flourished in Prussian Berlin alone. A would be national leader who spent half his life-span frigging about in some potty city like Munich was wasting his time: once he got to Berlin he would have to start again from the bottom.

The politician who didn't know that fact didn't know much; and Bavarian Strasser had done the only sensible thing in removing himself to Berlin as soon as he could, leaving addlepate Hitler to crow in his own backyard (said the Count).

But Hitler, Strasser—how could these distant rivalries ever matter to Coventry?

Here the picnicking season had really come at last. If you passed those allotments and followed the Quinton Road for a mile or two you came to the line of poplars which guarded Quinton Pool; and there began those seven Elysian Fields collectively called “The Chesils”: a tinkling stream, and a sheep-dip—and wonder of wonders, a donkey with cloven hooves! A spring where watercress grew for the picking; and even cowslips (rare in the arable county of Warwick, because they need permanent pasture and cannot survive the plough). Where it was dry there were harebells and lady's-slipper and scabious: where it was damp forget-me-not grew. There were trees to climb, and bushes for hide-and-seek: later on there'd be hazel-nuts—even walnuts, and prickly Spanish chestnuts.

The Chesils of course were a favorite haunt of Norah's horde; but even here there was just one field where none of them ever went, though there too sheets of pale pink lady's-smock painted the meadow (as Warwickshire Shakespeare says) “with delight.” This was that seventh field down Baginton way where Quinton Stream runs into the Sowe; and they shunned it for fear of a certain and horrible death. For where all those tempting king-cups and bullrushes grew it was bottomless bog, and each generation of children had scared the pants off the next with tales how that bog could catch you and swallow you down if you even peeped at it through the hedge.

By now it was tulip-time at Mellton: moreover Mary's chair had arrived (a metal contraption which moved on pneumatic wheels, with hidden padded supports for her body and in-conspicuous straps), so Mary too could be taken out in the open air. Twice the great occasion had been postponed because of a fill-dyke deluge of rain which seemed more winter than spring; but then at last came a day when the sun was shining into her downstairs room and everything sparkled. The chair was brought to her bedside, and Nurse and Gilbert together lifted her in.

But Mary had lain in her bed so long that the limited scene in front of her eyes had flattened itself in her sight like a painted scene in a picture, that same two-dimensional world one supposes the sea-anemone sees staying fixed to his rock; and even the changed perspectives effected by moving her just this foot or two were enough to make the familiar scene unreally three-dimensional suddenly, wholly ominous.... Once they began to wheel her moreover those new-found solids began to move, and all these restlessly-wheeling objects around her made her so giddy she longed to ask them to stop. She'd have asked them to put her back in her bed and to leave her there for good if she hadn't felt too ashamed; and worse was to come, for as Mary was wheeled from the room altogether doors hurtled towards her widening just in time to swallow her up (unable even to turn her head in its padded iron collar). Then she found herself suddenly out in the open air loosed on the outside world like a newborn babe from the womb, while everything kept on changing aspect and shifting—while statues and even trees walked across the distant scene, then totally vanished from sight. Firmly she told herself it was she who was moving while they stayed still; but even so this bodiless bodily motion beyond control of her will had made her so deathly afraid that at last she couldn't control her panic.

Obligingly Gilbert halted her chair, in one of those narrow paths between the small square tulip-beds with their edgings of box. Then at once the whirling kaleidoscope ceased, and the world grew sane and still as she sat in the unaccustomed sunshine, gazing straight ahead at the colors and shapes of the massed tulips in front of her. Soon she was gazing as though she had never seen tulips before; and indeed, never before in the whole of her life had tulips seemed real the way these tulips were real....

Polly was hovering near, and brought her an exquisite parrot-tulip with frilly edges—wide open, its petals almost ready to drop. She held it to Mary face-to-face so close that the petals completely covered her mother's eyes. Thus the sun shone in Mary's eyes through green veins threading translucent scarlet; and now that so little of Mary's body was “her” any longer it seemed as if even the trunk and legs she had lost had never been Mary the way this tulip was Mary.

Moreover once she had thus far broken her old corporeal bounds soon even these lawns and bushes—these gardens, as far as the eye could see.... In short, it wasn't so many months since “every inch from the crown of Mary's head to the tips of Mary's toes” had been Mary's limits, but now every inch from the crown of Mary's head to the tips of Mary's
trees
rejoiced at being alive.

Of course as summer wore on this sort of ecstatic vision was doomed to fade into common day.

*

Meanwhile that summer of 1925 seemed likely to prove Lepowski right: in Bavaria Hitler appeared content to be marking time, while Gregor Strasser (joined now by his even more radical brother Otto) already was scoring a marked success in the North: there the Leftish yet patriotic Gospel-according-to-Strasser was catching on fast, mainly among the enthusiastic idealist young. Wherever he preached his gospel he founded a Nazi cell; and soon there were quite enough of a new breed of Northern Nazi who looked to Berlin for their orders for even this pair of unflagging workers to need more help.

Back in Bavaria, Gregor Strasser had had as his henchman a youth called Heinrich Himmler: a faithful soul, and a highly competent confidential clerk, but handicapped by a fatally one-track mind. On Jews, for example: “Our Heinrich looks for Jews underneath his bed every night before he dares get into it,” Gregor remarked to his brother. Moreover some-one was needed able to wield a pen. Rosenberg's Munich
Beobachter
scarcely sold fifty copies among the capital's four million readers: these Northern Nazis needed their own Northern papers backing the radical Strasser line.... So Himmler was written off as someone with more ambition than brains, and instead they recruited his absolute opposite. This was a Rhineland working-class twenty-eight-year-old permanent adolescent adorned with an academic degree and almost too much imagination: the author of novels and verseplays much too wild to get printed or staged (but ideas too far-fetched for fiction can yet be swallowed hook-line-and-sinker when offered as fact). Otto and Gauleiter Kaufmann saw him together, and both were impressed. The poor young man appeared club-footed, and almost a dwarf; but his brain-pan was big enough, and so were his large intelligent almost womanish eyes—while his dwarf's compensatory need to be loved and admired cried aloud.

With his beautiful speaking voice and his vitriolic pen, this young Dr. Josef Göbbels seemed worthy at least of a minor post in Kaufmann's office coupled with journalistic work for the Strassers.

This summer of 1925 was indeed a notable summer: the Rhineland summer when Göbbels joined the Nazis, the Mellton summer when Mary had really begun to convalesce, the West Wales summer when Newton Llantony grew a new roof—and the unforgettable Coventry summer when Norah fell through the floor.

Saturday night was everyone's fried-supper night in Slaughterhouse Yard: for Saturday's food was cheap on the market stalls, where meat could be only ninepence a joint and for sixpence they gave you a whacking great cod. After this orgy the children were dosed with their weekly dose (alternately one week liquorice-powder with brimstone-and-treacle the next) to keep their blood pure. It was also bath-night. In every house the copper was lit to heat the water: the smaller children were bathed in twos and the larger in turns in a galvanized wash-tub in front of the kitchen fire, then chased up to bed for their parents to have a go. But something was changing in Norah this summer, something which seemed to require her to take her bath unobserved: so tonight she had carried the tub upstairs and set it beside her bed, while her brothers lugged up the buckets of water. Then Norah undressed, and sat in the wash-tub soaping herself like a lady in lonely glory.

Once she was out of the water however she'd finished with being a lady: she'd got the still more ambitious idea of practicing being one of those naked statues which stand in the public parks. But these are always high on a plinth (to be out of the reach of rude little boys): so she climbed on top of the family chest-of-drawers and dried herself there in appropriate attitudes. All went well till somebody called her to hurry up: she jumped off the chest-of-drawers, and the floor was so rotten it gave way under her. Straight through the kitchen ceiling she fell, and arrived on the kitchen floor in a cloud of dust on top of a pile of plaster. Norah was properly penitent (next time she went to Confession she'd have to confess her vanity). Everyone cleared up the mess, and her father mended the ceiling the following day; but it took him a week of scrounging to come by suitable bits of wood for mending the floor above. Till then, the hole in the floor must remain.

This was the end of anyone bathing upstairs of course, but not quite the end of the story. None of these houses had bedroom partitions upstairs, but in this one old cotton bedspreads hanging between the beds divided it into “rooms.” Norah's “room” was one end of the line: then came her parents, and down at the further end came the boys—who each had a bed to himself, which was almost unknown in a Yard where most of the children slept happily hugger-mugger. Secretly Derek had stretched a string right along the floor and tied one end to his toe, while Norah tied hers to the other: so hot-line communication wasn't impossible.

Three nights after the floor had been finally mended Norah was roused by a tug so urgent it nearly pulled off her toe. Careful not to disturb the curtains she burrowed noiselessly under the bed where her parents slept, and surfaced at last between Derek and Charlie. Both their heads were under the bedclothes, and when she whispered “What is it?” Charlie hollowly answered: “Gh-ghosts!” Norah clutched at his hand and listened, rapidly saying her prayers: for something was making curious sounds—like something kept running across the floor.... But the moon was bright, and nothing was running across the floor.... Then came a terrible muffled yowl, and Norah jumped into bed on top of Charlie—then jumped out again and woke up her mother.

Still those invisible pattering feet.... It was Mum who guessed that this had to be something running
under
the floor, on top of the kitchen ceiling below. When Dad took up one of the boards he had laid only three days before, out leapt a cat and streaked through the window. She must have been trapped there for three days at least; but she couldn't be fatter and sleeker with all the mice she had found.

*

Norah's Irish-Catholic faith was simple, yet served her in all the changes and chances that Norah had met in this mortal-life—so far. Mary's atheist-humanist faith was equally simple, but useless in Mary's present predicament. Mary believed in no “God” she had vexed to get punished like this: no personified Destiny even by whom she could feel ill-used There was no one to blame: it was just the luck of the draw which had rendered her nowadays only a desolate disconnected brain-pan—and one more akin to Friar Bacon's magical speaking Brazen Head than to any psalm-singing cherub. But “Time HAS BEEN” said the Brazen Head, then fell to the ground of its own accord and broke.... Mary could easily die: even now it only meant giving up trying, and surely prolonged existence could serve no possible cosmic use.... Yet Mary elected to go on trying: against all reason,
something
inside her had won.

So the summer wore on, with sloping planks arranged wherever the house or garden had shallow steps: for by now she had fully recovered the use of her arms and could trundle her chair herself (so Nursemaid Gilbert was more-or-less out of a job). She refused to be helped: she had reached a prickly stage which resented special attentions suspecting pity—and pity was unforgivable. Mary indeed seemed bent by now on impressing the world with how little she differed from you and me, except that she went on wheels where we go on feet. Poor Gilbert durstn't even so much as pick up some book she had dropped, for Mary had special tongs (whose magnetic tips could even pick up a needle).

Augustine and Joan were constantly with her still. Joan was incredibly kind and good and Mary had come to love her; but Joan had her widowed Archdeacon to see to and even Augustine had got his dry-rot in Wales—as Mary kept on reminding them, often downright ungraciously. Both did their best to persuade her they came for their own sweet pleasure entirely, but Mary was hard to persuade.

Presently Jeremy came home on weekend leave. By common consent the pair of them teased her in front of him, telling him just how badly lately Mary behaved to all who loved her. But Mary was unrepentant, and gave them as good as she got: “Remember I've just been enduring a second childhood, so now you've got to put up with my second adolescence.”