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Molly laughed then, and so did I. So did Charlie, and so did the whole school.
From that moment on Molly became one of us. It was as if she had suddenly joined our family and become our sister. When Molly came home with us that afternoon Big Joe gave her some flowers he’d picked, and Mother treated her like the daughter she’d never had. After that, Molly came home with us almost every afternoon. She seemed to want to be with us all the time. We didn’t discover the reason for this until a lot later. I remember Mother used to brush Molly’s hair. She loved doing it and we loved watching.
Mother. I think of her so often. And when I think of her I think of high hedges and deep lanes and our walks down to the river together in the evenings. I think of meadowsweet and honeysuckle and vetch and foxgloves and red campion and dog roses. There wasn’t a wild flower or a butterfly she couldn’t name. I loved the sound of their names when she spoke them: red admiral, peacock, cabbage white, adonis blue. It’s her voice I’m hearing in my head now. I don’t know why, but I can hear her better than I can picture her. I suppose it was because of Big Joe that she was always talking, always explaining the world about us. She was his guide, his interpreter, his teacher.
They wouldn’t have Big Joe at school. Mr Munnings said he was backward. He wasn’t backward at all. He was different, “special” Mother used to call him, but he was not backward. He needed help, that’s all, and Mother was his help. It was as if Big Joe was blind in some way. He could see perfectly well, but very often he didn’t seem to understand what he was seeing. And he wanted to understand so badly. So Mother would be forever telling him how and why things were as they were. And she would sing to him often, too, because it always made him happy and soothed him whenever he had one of his turns and became anxious or troubled. She’d sing to Charlie and me as well, more out of habit, I think. But we loved it, loved the sound of her voice. Her voice was the music of our childhood.
After Father died the music stopped. There was a stillness and a quietness in Mother now, and a sadness about the house. I had my terrible secret, a secret I could scarcely ever put out of my mind. So in my guilt I kept more and more to myself. Even Big Joe hardly ever laughed. At meals the kitchen seemed especially empty without Father, without his bulk and his voice filling the room. His dirty work coat didn’t hang in the porch any more, and the smell of his pipe lingered only faintly now. He was gone and we were all quietly mourning him in our way.
Mother still talked to Big Joe, but not as much as before. She had to talk to him, because she was the only one who truly understood the meaning of all the grunts and squawks Big Joe used for language. Charlie and I understood some of it, some of the time, but she seemed to understand all he wanted to say, sometimes even before he said it. There was a shadow hanging over her, Charlie and I could see that, and not only the shadow of Father’s death. We were sure there was something else she wouldn’t talk about, something she was hiding from us. We found out what it was only too soon.
We were back home after school having our tea — Molly was there too — when there was a knock on the door. Mother seemed at once to know who it was. She took time to gather herself, smoothing down her apron and arranging her hair before she opened the door. It was the Colonel. “I wanted a word, Mrs Peaceful,” he said. “I think you know what I’ve come for.”
Mother told us to finish our tea, closed the door and went out into the garden with him. Charlie and I left Molly and Big Joe at the table and dashed out of the back door. We hurdled the vegetables, ran along the hedge, crouched down behind the woodshed and listened. We were close enough to hear every word that was said.
“It may seem a little indelicate to broach the subject so soon after your late husband’s sad and untimely death,” the Colonel was saying, He wasn’t looking at Mother as he spoke, but down at his top hat which he was smoothing with his sleeve. “But it’s a question of the cottage. Strictly speaking, of course, Mrs Peaceful, you have no right to live here any more. You know well enough I think that this is a tied cottage, tied to your late husband’s job on the estate. Now of course with him gone …”
“I know what you’re saying. Colonel,” Mother said. “You want us out.”
“Well, I wouldn’t put it quite like that. It’s not that I want you out, Mrs Peaceful, not if we can come to some other arrangement.”
“Arrangement? What arrangement?” Mother asked.
“Well,” the Colonel went on, “as it happens there’s a position up at the house that might suit you. My wife’s lady’s maid has just given notice. As you know my wife is not a well woman. These days she spends most of her life in a wheelchair. She needs constant care and attention seven days a week.”
“But I have my children,” Mother protested. “Who would look after my children?”
It was a while before the Colonel spoke. “The two boys are old enough now to fend for themselves, I should have thought. And as for the other one, there is the lunatic asylum in Exeter. I’m sure I could see to it that a place be found for—”
Mother interrupted, her fury only barely suppressed, her voice cold but still calm. “I could never do that, Colonel. Never. But if I want to keep a roof over our heads, then I have to find some way I can come to work for you as your wife’s maid. That is what you’re telling me, isn’t it.”
“I’d say you understand the position perfectly, Mrs Peaceful. I couldn’t have put it better myself. I shall need your agreement within the week. Good day Mrs Peaceful. And once again my condolences.”
We watched him go, leaving Mother standing there. I had never in my life seen her cry before, but she cried now. She fell on her knees in the long grass holding her face in her hands. That was when Big Joe and Molly came out of the cottage. When Big Joe saw Mother he ran and knelt down beside her, hugging and rocking her gently in his arms, singing Oranges and Lemons until she began to smile through her tears and join in. Then we were all singing together, and loudly in our defiance so that the Colonel could not help but hear us.
Later, after Molly had gone home, Charlie and I sat in silence in the orchard. I almost told him my secret then. I wanted to so badly. But I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. I thought he might never speak to me again if I did. The moment passed. “I hate that man,” said Charlie under his breath. “I’ll do him, Tommo. One day I’ll really do him.”
Of course Mother had no choice. She had to take the job, and we only had one relative to turn to for help, Grandma Wolf. She moved in the next week to look after us. She wasn’t our grandmother at all, not really — both our grandmothers were dead. She was Mother’s aunt, but always insisted we called her “Grandma” because she thought Great Aunt made her sound old and crotchety, which she always was. We hadn’t liked her before she moved in — as much on account of her moustache as anything else — and we liked her even less now that she had. We all knew her story; how she’d worked up at the Big House for the Colonel for years as housekeeper, and how, for some reason, the Colonel’s wife couldn’t stand her. They’d had a big falling out, and in the end she’d had to leave and go to live in the village. That was why she was free to come and look after us.
But between ourselves Charlie and I had never called her either Great Aunt or Grandma. We had our own name for her. When we were younger Mother had often read us Little Red Riding Hood. There was a picture in it Charlie and I knew well, of the wolf in bed pretending to be Little Red Riding Hood’s grandma. She had a black bonnet on her head, like our “Grandma” always used to wear, and she had big teeth with gaps in between, just like our “Grandma” too. So ever since I could remember we had called her “Grandma Wolf”— never to her face, of course. Mother said it wasn’t respectful, but secretly I think she always quite liked it.
Soon it wasn’t only because of the book that we thought of her as Grandma Wolf. She very quickly showed us who was in charge now that Mother was not there. Everything had to be just so: hands washed, hair done, no talking with your mouth full, no leaving anything on your plate. Waste not, want not, she’d say. That wasn’t so bad. We got used to it. But what we could not forgive was that she was nasty to Big Joe. She talked to him, and about him, as if he were stupid or mad. She’d treat him as if he were a baby. She was forever wiping his mouth for him, or telling him not to sing at the table. When Molly protested once, she smacked her and sent her home. She smacked Big Joe too, whenever he didn’t do what she said, which was often. He would start to rock then and talk to himself, which is what he always did whenever he was upset. But now Mother wasn’t there to sing to him, to calm him. Molly talked to him, and we tried too, but it was not the same.
From the day Grandma Wolf moved in, our whole world changed. Mother would go to work up at the Big House at dawn, before we went off to school, and she still wouldn’t be back when we got home for our tea. Instead Grandma Wolf would be there, at the door of what seemed to us now to be her lair. And Big Joe, who she wouldn’t allow to go off on his wanders as he’d always loved to do, would come rushing up to us as if he hadn’t seen us in weeks. He’d do the same to Mother when she came home, but she was often so exhausted she could hardly talk to him. She could see what was going on but was powerless to do anything about it. It seemed to all of us as if we were losing her, as if she was being replaced and pushed aside.
It was Grandma Wolf who did all the talking now, even telling Mother what to do in her own house. She was forever saying how Mother hadn’t brought us up properly, that our manners were terrible, that we didn’t know right from wrong — and that Mother had married beneath her. “I told her then and I’ve told her since,” she ranted on, “she could have done far better for herself. But did she listen? Oh no. She had to marry the first man to turn her head, and him nothing but a forester. She was meant for better things, a better class of person. We were shopkeepers — we ran a proper shop, I can tell you — made a tidy profit, too. In a big way of business, I’ll have you know. But oh no, she wouldn’t have it. Broke your grandfather’s heart, she did. And now look what she’s come to: a lady’s maid, at her age. Trouble. Your mother’s always been nothing but trouble from the day she was born.”
We longed for Mother to stand up to her, but each time she just gave in meekly, too worn out to do anything else. To Charlie and me she seemed almost to have become a different person. There was no laughter in her voice, no light in her eyes. And all along I knew full well whose fault it was that this had all happened, that Father was dead, that Mother had to go to work up at the Big House, and that Grandma Wolf had moved in and taken her place.
At night we could sometimes hear Grandma Wolf snoring in bed, and Charlie and I would make up this story about the Colonel and Grandma Wolf; how one day we’d go up to the Big House and push the Colonel’s wife into the lake and drown her, and then Mother could come home and be with us and Big Joe and Molly, and everything could be like it had been before. Then the Colonel and Grandma Wolf could marry one another and live unhappily ever after, and because they were so old they could have lots of little monster children born already old and wrinkly with gappy teeth: the girls with moustaches like Grandma Wolf, the boys with whiskers like the Colonel.
I remember I used to have nightmares filled with those monster children, but whatever my nightmare it would always end the same way. I would be out in the woods with Father and the tree would be falling, and I’d wake up screaming. Then Charlie would be there beside me, and everything would be all right again. Charlie always made things all right again.
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There’s a mouse in here with me. He’s sitting there in the light of the lamp, looking up at me. He seems as surprised to see me as I am to see him. There he goes. I can hear him still, scurrying about somewhere under the hayrack. I think he’s gone now. I hope he comes back. I miss him already.
Grandma Wolf hated mice. She had a deep fear of them that she could not hide. So Charlie and I had lots to smile about in the autumn when the rain and the cold came and the mice decided it was warmer inside and came to live with us in the cottage. Big Joe loved the mice — he’d even put out food for them. Grandma Wolf would shout at him for that and smack him. But Big Joe could never understand why he was being smacked, so he went on feeding the mice just as he had before. Grandma Wolf put traps down, but Charlie and I would find them and spring them. All that autumn she only ever managed to catch one.
That mouse had the best funeral any mouse ever had. Big Joe was chief mourner and he cried enough for all of us. Molly, Charlie and I dug the grave, and when we’d laid him to rest Molly piled the grave high with flowers and sang What a friend we have in Jesus. We did all this at the bottom of the orchard hidden behind the apple trees where Grandma Wolf could not see or hear us. Afterwards we sat in a circle round the grave and had a funeral feast of blackberries. Big Joe stopped crying to eat the blackberries, and then with blackened mouths we all sang Oranges and Lemons over the mouse’s grave.
Grandma Wolf tried everything to get rid of the mice. She put poison down under the sink in the larder. We swept it up. She asked Bob James, the wart charmer from the village with the crooked nose, to come and charm the mice away. He tried, but it didn’t work. So in the end, in desperation, she had to resort to chasing them out of the house with a broom. But they just kept coming back in again. All this made her nastier than ever towards us. But for Charlie and me, just to see her frightened silly and screeching like a witch was worth every smack she gave us.
In bed at night our Grandma Wolf story was changing every time we told it. Now the Colonel and Grandma Wolf didn’t have human children at all. Instead she gave birth to giant mice-children, all of them with great long tails and twitchy whiskers. But after what she did next, we decided that even that horrible fate was too good for her.
Although Grandma Wolf did smack Molly from time to time, it soon became obvious that she liked her a great deal better than the rest of us. There were good reasons for this. Girls were nice, Grandma Wolf would often tell us, not coarse and vulgar like boys. Besides she was good friends with Molly’s mother and father. They lived as we did in a cottage on the Colonel’s estate — Molly’s father was groom up at the Big House. They were proper people. Grandma Wolf told us; good, God-fearing people who had brought their child up well — which meant strictly. And from what Molly told us, they were strict too. She was forever being sent to her room, or strapped by her father for the least little thing. She was an only child of older parents and, as Molly often said, they wanted her to be perfect. Anyway, it was a good thing for us that Grandma approved of her family, otherwise I’m sure she would have forbidden Molly to come and see us. As it was, Grandma Wolf said Molly was a good influence, that she could teach us some manners, and make us a little less coarse and vulgar. So, thank goodness, Molly kept coming home with us for tea every day after school.
Not long after the mouse’s funeral, it was Big Joe’s birthday. Charlie and I had got him some humbugs from Mrs Bright’s shop in the village — which he always loved — and Molly brought him a present in a little brown box with air holes in it and elastic bands round it. While we were in school she kept it hidden in the shrubs at the bottom of the school yard. It was only because we pestered her that she showed us what it was as we were walking home. It was a harvest mouse, the sweetest little mouse I ever saw, with oversized ears and bewildered eyes. She stroked him with the back of her finger and he sat up for her in the box and twitched his whiskers at us. She gave him to Big Joe after tea, down in the orchard out of sight of the cottage, well hidden from Grandma Wolf’s ever watchful gaze. Big Joe hugged Molly as if he’d never let her go. He kept the birthday mouse in his own box and hid him away in a drawer in his bedroom cupboard — he said it would be too cold for him outside in the woodshed with all his other creatures. The mouse became his instant favourite. All of us tried to make Big Joe understand that he mustn’t ever tell Grandma Wolf, that if she ever knew, she’d take his mouse away and kill it.
I don’t know how she found out, but when we came home from school a few days later Big Joe was sitting on the floor of his room, sobbing his heart out, his drawer empty beside him. Grandma Wolf came storming in saying she wasn’t going to have any nasty dirty animals in her house. Worse still, so that he’d never bring any of his other animals into the house, she’d got rid of them all: the slowworm, the two lizards, the hedgehog. Big Joe’s family of animals were gone, and he was heartbroken. Molly screamed at her that she was a cruel, cruel woman and that she’d go to Hell when she was dead, and then ran off home in tears.
That night Charlie and I made up a story about how we’d put rat poison in Grandma Wolf’s tea the next day and kill her. We did get rid of her in the end too, but thankfully without the use of rat poison. Instead, a miracle happened, a wonderful miracle.
First, the Colonel’s wife died in her wheelchair, so we didn’t have to push her into the lake after all. She choked on a scone at teatime, and despite everything Mother did to try to save her, she just stopped breathing. There was a big funeral which we all had to go to. She had a shining coffin with silver handles, piled high with flowers. The vicar said how loved she was in the parish, and how she’d devoted her life to caring for everyone on the estate — all of which was news to us.
Afterwards they opened up the church floor and lowered her into the family vault while we all sang Abide with me. And I was thinking that I’d rather be in Father’s simple coffin and buried outside where the sun shines and the wind blows, not down in some gloomy hole with a crowd of dead relatives. Mother had to take Big Joe out in the middle of the hymn because he started singing Oranges and Lemons again very loudly and would not stop. Grandma Wolf bared her teeth at us — as wolves do — and furrowed her brow in disapproval. We didn’t know it then, but very soon she would disappear almost totally from our lives, taking all her anger, all her threats and disapproval with her.
So suddenly, joy of joys, Mother was back home with us again, and we hoped it was only a question of time before Grandma Wolf moved back up to the village. There was no job for Mother any more up at the Big House, no lady to be a maid to. She was home, and day by day she was becoming her old self again. There were wonderful blazing arguments between her and Grandma Wolf, mostly about how Grandma Wolf treated Big Joe. Mother said that now she was home she wouldn’t stand for it any more. We listened to every word, and loved every moment of it. But there was one big shadow over all this new joy. We could see that with Mother out of work and no money coming in, things were becoming desperate. There was no money in the mug on the mantelpiece, and every day there was less food on the table. For a while we had little to eat but potatoes, and we all knew perfectly well that sooner or later the Colonel would put us out of the cottage. We were just waiting for the knock on the door. Meanwhile we were becoming very hungry.
It was Charlie’s idea to go poaching: salmon, sea trout, rabbits, even deer if we were lucky, he said. Father had done a bit of poaching, so Charlie knew what to do. Molly and I would be on lookout. He could do the trapping or the fishing. So, at dusk, or dawn, whenever we could get away together, we went off poaching on the Colonel’s land: in the Colonel’s forests or in the Colonel’s river where there were plenty of sea trout and plenty of salmon. We couldn’t take Big Joe because he could start his singing at any time and give us away. Besides he’d tell Mother. He told Mother everything.
We did well. We brought back lots of rabbits, a few trout and, once, a fourteen-pound salmon. So now we had something to eat with our potatoes. We didn’t tell Mother we’d been on the Colonel’s land. She wouldn’t have approved of that sort of thing at all, and we definitely didn’t want Grandma Wolf knowing because she’d certainly have gone and reported us to the Colonel at once. “My friend, the Colonel,” she called him. She was always full of his praises, so we knew we had to be careful. We said we’d caught our rabbits in the orchard and the fish from the village brook. The trout you could catch there were only small, but they didn’t know that. Charlie told them that the salmon must have come up the brook to spawn, which they did do of course. Charlie always lied well, and they believed him. Thank God.
Molly and I would keep watch while Charlie set the traps or put out his nets. Lambert, the Colonel’s bailiff, may have been old, but he was clever, and we knew he’d let his dog loose on us if he ever caught us at it. Late one evening, sitting by the bridge with Charlie busy at his nets downstream, Molly took my hand in hers and held it tight. “I don’t like the dark,” she whispered. I had never been so happy.
When the Colonel turned up at the house the next day, we thought it must be either because we’d been found out somehow or because he was going to evict us. It was neither. Grandma Wolf seemed to be expecting him, and that was strange. She went to the door and invited him in. He nodded at Mother and then frowned at us. Grandma Wolf waved us outside as she asked the Colonel to sit down. We tried eavesdropping but Big Joe was no good at keeping quiet, so we had to wait until later to hear the worst. As it turned out, the worst was not the worst at all, but the best.
After the Colonel had gone, Grandma Wolf called us in. I could see she was puffed up with self-importance, aglow with it. “Your mother will explain,” she declared grandly, putting on her bonnet. “I have to get up to the Big House right away. I’ve work to do.”
Mother waited until she’d gone and could not help smiling as she told us, “Well,” she began, “you know some time ago your great aunt used to work as housekeeper up at the Big House?”
“And then she got kicked out by the Colonel’s wife,” said Charlie.
“She lost her job, yes,” Mother went on. “Well, now the Colonel’s wife has passed away it seems the Colonel wants her back as live-in housekeeper. She’ll be moving up to the Big House as soon as possible.”
I didn’t cheer, but I certainly felt like it.
“What about the cottage?” Charlie asked. “Is the old duffer putting us out then?”
“No, dear. We’re staying put,” Mother replied. “He said his wife had liked me and made him promise to look after me if ever anything happened to her. So he’s keeping that promise. Say what you like about the Colonel, he’s a man of his word. I’ve agreed I’ll do all his linen for him and his sewing work. Most of it I can bring home. So we’ll have some money coming in. We’ll manage. Well, are you happy? We’re staying put!”
Then we did cheer and Big Joe cheered too, louder than any of us. So we stayed on in our cottage and Grandma Wolf moved out. We were liberated, and all was right with the world again. For a while at least.
Both of them being older than me, Molly by two years, Charlie by three, they always ran faster than I did. I seem to have spent much of my life watching them racing ahead of me, leaping the high meadow grass, Molly’s plaits whirling about her head, their laughter mingling. When they got too far ahead I sometimes felt they wanted to be without me. I would whine at them then to let them know I was feeling all miserable and abandoned, and they’d wait for me to catch up. Best of all Molly would sometimes come running back and take my hand.
When we weren’t poaching the Colonel’s fish or scrumping his apples — more than anything we all loved the danger of it, I think — we would be roaming wild in the countryside. Molly could shin up a tree like a cat, faster than either of us. Sometimes we’d go down to the river bank and watch the kingfishers flash by, or we’d go swimming in Okement Pool hung all around by willows, where the water was dark and deep and mysterious, and where no one ever came.
I remember the day Molly dared Charlie to take off all his clothes, and to my amazement he did. Then she did, and they ran shrieking and bare-bottomed into the water. When they called me in after them, I wouldn’t do it, not in front of Molly. So I sat and sulked on the bank and watched them splashing and giggling, and all the while I was wishing I had the courage to do what Charlie had done, wishing I was with them. Molly got dressed afterwards behind a bush and told us not to watch. But we did. That was the first time I ever saw a girl with no clothes on. She was very thin and white, and she wrung her plaits out like a wet cloth.
It was several days before they managed to entice me in. Molly stood waist-deep in the river and put her hands over her eyes. “Come on, Tommo,” she cried. “I won’t watch. Promise.” And not wanting to be left out yet again, I stripped off and made a dash for the river, covering myself as I went just in case Molly was watching through her fingers. After I’d done it that first time, it never seemed to bother me again.
Sometimes when we tired of all the frolicking we’d lie and talk in the shallows, letting the river ripple over us. How we talked. Molly told us once that she wanted to die right there and then, that she never wanted tomorrow to come because no tomorrow could ever be as good as today. “I know,” she said, and she sat up in the river then and collected a handful of small pebbles. “I’m going to tell our future. I’ve seen the gypsies do it.” She shook the pebbles around in her cupped hands, closed her eyes and then scattered them out on to the muddy shore. Kneeling over them she spoke very seriously and slowly as if she were reading them. “They say we’ll always be together, the three of us, for ever and ever. They say that as long as we stick together we’ll be lucky and happy.” Then she smiled at us. “And the stones never lie,” she said. “So you’re stuck with me.”
For a year or two Molly’s stones proved right. But then Molly got ill. She wasn’t at school one day. It was the scarlet fever, Mr Munnings told us, and very serious. Charlie and I went up to her cottage that evening after tea with some sweetpeas Mother had picked for her — because they smell sweeter than any flower she knew, she said. We knew we wouldn’t be allowed in to see her because scarlet fever was very catching, but Molly’s mother did not look at all pleased to see us. She always looked grey and grim, but that day she was angry as well. She took the flowers with scarcely a glance at them, and told us it would be better if we didn’t come again. Then Molly’s father appeared from behind her, looking gruff and unkempt, and told us to be off, that we were disturbing Molly’s sleep. As I walked away, all I could think of was how unhappy Molly must be living in that dingy little cottage with a mother and father like that, and how trees fall on the wrong fathers. We stopped at the end of the path and looked up at Molly’s window, hoping she would come and wave at us. When she didn’t we knew she must be really ill.
Charlie and I never said our prayers at all any more, not since Sunday school, but we did now. Kneeling side by side with Big Joe we prayed each night that Molly would not die. Joe sang Oranges and Lemons and we said Amen afterwards. We had our fingers crossed too, just for good measure.
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I‘m not sure I ever really believed in God, even in Sunday school. In church I’d gaze up at Jesus hanging on the cross in the stained-glass window, and feel sorry for him because I could see how cruel it was and how much it must be hurting him. I knew he was a good and kind man. But I never really understood why God, who was supposed to be his father, and almighty and powerful, would let them do that to him, would let him suffer so much. I believed then, as I believe now, that crossed fingers and Molly’s stones are every bit as reliable or unreliable as praying to God. I shouldn’t think like that because if there’s no God, then there can be no heaven. Tonight I want very much to believe there’s a heaven, that, as Father said, there is a new life after death, that death is not a full stop, and that we will all see one another again.
It was while Molly was ill in bed with the scarlet fever that Charlie and I discovered that although in one way Molly’s stones had let us down, in another way they had indeed spoken the truth: with her, with the three of us together, we were lucky, and without her we weren’t. Up until now, whenever the three of us had gone out together poaching the Colonel’s fish, we had never been caught. We’d had a few close shaves with old Lambert and his dog, but our lookout system had always worked. Somehow we’d always heard them coming and managed to make ourselves scarce. But the very first time Charlie and I went out poaching without Molly, things went wrong, badly wrong, and it was my fault.
We had chosen a perfect poaching night, not a breath of wind so we could hear anyone coming. With Molly beside me on lookout I’d never felt sleepy, and we’d always heard old Lambert and his dog in plenty of time for Charlie to get out of the river, for us all to make good our escape. But on this particular night my concentration failed me. I’d made myself comfortable, probably too comfortable, in our usual place by the bridge with Charlie netting downstream. But after sitting there for a while I just fell asleep. I don’t drop off all that easily, but when I do sleep I sleep deeply.
The first I knew of anything was a dog snuffling at my neck. Then he was barking in my face, and old Lambert was dragging me to my feet. And there was Charlie way out in the middle of the moonlit river hauling at the nets.
“Peaceful boys! You young rascals,” Lambert growled. “Caught you red-handed. You’re for it now, make no mistake.”
Charlie could have left me there. He could have made a run for it and got clean away, but Charlie’s not like that. He never has been.
At the point of a shotgun Lambert marched us back along the river and up to the Big House, his dog snarling at our heels from time to time just to remind us he was still there, and that he’d eat us alive if we made a run for it. Lambert locked us in the stables and left us. We waited in the darkness, the horses shifting and munching and snorting around us. All too soon we saw the approaching light of a lamp, and heard footsteps and voices. Then the Colonel was there in his slippers and his dressing gown, and he had Grandma Wolf with him in her nightcap looking every bit as fierce as Lambert's dog.
The Colonel looked from one to the other of us, shaking his head in disgust. But Grandma Wolf had the first word. “I’ve never in all my life been so ashamed,” she said. “My own family. You’re nothing but a downright disgrace. And after all the Colonel’s done for us. Common thieves, that’s what you are. Nothing but common thieves.”
When she’d finished it was the Colonel’s turn. “Only one way to deal with young ruffians like you,” he said. “I could have you up before the magistrate, but since I’m the magistrate anyway there’s no need to go to all that trouble, is there? I’ll sentence you right now. You will come up here tomorrow morning at ten o’clock sharp, and I’ll give each of you the hiding you so richly deserve. Then you can stay and clean out the hunt kennels till I say you can go. That should teach you not to come poaching on my land.”
When we got home we had to tell Mother everything we’d done, everything the Colonel had said. Charlie did most of the talking. Mother sat listening in silence, her face stony. When she spoke, she spoke in little more than a whisper. “I can tell you one thing,” she said. “There’ll be no hiding. Over my dead body.” Then she looked up at us, her eyes full of tears. “Why? You said you’d been fishing in the brook. You told me. Oh Charlie, Tommo.” Big Joe stroked her hair. He was anxious and bewildered. She patted his arm. “It’s all right, Joe. I’ll go up there with them tomorrow. Cleaning out the kennels I don’t mind — you deserve that. But it stops there. I won’t let that man lay a finger on you, not one finger, no matter what.”
Mother was as good as her word. How she did it and what was said we never knew, but the next day after Mother and the Colonel had had a meeting in his study, she made us stand in front of him and apologise. Then after a long lecture about trespassing on private property, the Colonel said that he’d changed his mind, that instead of the hiding we would be set to cleaning out the Colonel’s kennels every Saturday and Sunday until Christmas.
As it turned out we didn’t mind at all because, although the smell could be disgusting, the hounds were all around us as we worked, their tails high and waving and happy. So we often stopped work to pet them, after we’d made quite sure no one was looking. We had a particular favourite called Bertha. She was almost pure white with one brown foot and had the most beautiful eyes. She would always stand near us as we scraped and swept, gazing up at us in open adoration. Every time I looked into her eyes I thought of Molly. Like Bertha, she too had eyes the colour of heather honey.
We had to be careful, because Grandma Wolf, now more full of herself than ever, would frequently come out into the stable yard to make sure we were doing our work properly. She’d always have something nasty to say: “Serves you right,” or “That’ll teach you,” or “You should be ashamed of yourselves,” always delivered with a tut and a pained sigh. To finish there’d be some nasty quip about Mother. “Still, with a mother like that, I suppose you’re not entirely to blame, are you?”
Then Christmas Eve came and our punishment was over at last. We said fond farewells to Bertha and ran off home down the Colonel’s drive for the last time, blowing very loud raspberries as we went. Back in the cottage we found waiting for us the best Christmas present we could ever have hoped for. Molly was sitting there smiling at us as we came in through the door. She was pale, but she was back with us. We were together again. Her hair was cut shorter. The plaits were gone, and somehow that changed the whole look of her. She wasn’t a girl any more. She had a different beauty now, a beauty that at once stirred in me a new and deeper love.
I think, without knowing it, I had always charted my own growing up by constant comparison to Molly and Charlie. Day by day I was becoming ever more painfully aware of how far behind them I was. I wasn’t just smaller and slower than they were — I had never liked that, but I was used to it by now. The trouble was that it was becoming evident to me that the gap between us was more serious, and that it was widening. It really began when Molly was moved up into the Bigguns’ class. I was stuck being a Tiddler and they were growing away from me. But whilst we were still at the village school together I didn’t mind all that much because at least I was always near them. We walked to school together, ate our lunch together as we always had — up in the pantry in the vicarage, where the vicar’s wife would bring us lemonade — and then we’d come home together.
I looked forward all day to that long walk home, the school day done, their other friends not with us, with the fearsome Mr Munnings out of sight and out of mind for another day. We’d hare down the hill to the brook, pull off our great heavy boots and release our aching feet and toes at long last. We’d sit there on the bank wiggling our toes in the blessed cool of the water. We’d lie amongst the grass and buttercups of the water meadows and look up at the clouds scudding across the sky, at the wind-whipped crows chasing a mewing buzzard. Then we’d follow the brook home, feet squelching in the mud, our toes oozing with it. Strange when I think of it now, but there was a time when I loved mud, the smell of it, the feel of it, the larking about in it. Not any more.
Then quite suddenly, just after my twelfth birthday, the last of the larking was all over. Charlie and Molly left school and I was alone. I was a Biggun, in Mr Munnings’ class and hating him now even more than I feared him. I woke up dreading every day. Both Charlie and Molly had found work up in the Big House — almost everyone in the village worked up there or on the estate. Molly was under-parlour maid, and Charlie worked in the hunt kennels and in the stables looking after the dogs and the horses, which he loved. Molly didn’t come round to see us nearly so often as before — like Charlie, she worked six days a week. So I hardly saw her.
Charlie would come home late in the evenings as Father had before him, and he’d hang his coat up on Father’s peg and put his boots outside in the porch where Father’s boots had always been. He warmed his feet in the bottom oven when he came in out of the cold of a winter’s day, just as Father had done. That was the first time in my life I was ever really jealous of Charlie. I wanted to put my feet in the oven, and to come home from proper work, to earn money like Charlie did, to have a voice that didn’t pipe like the little children in Miss McAllister’s class. Most of all though I wanted to be with Molly again. I wanted us to be a threesome again, for everything to be just as it had been. But nothing stays the same. I learnt that then. I know that now.
At nights as Charlie and I lay in bed together Charlie just slept. We never made up our stories any more. When I did see Molly, and it was only on Sundays now, she was as kind to me as she always had been, but too kind almost, too protective, more like a little mother to me than a friend. I could see that she and Charlie lived in another world now. They talked endlessly about the goings on and scandals up at the Big House, about the prowling Wolfwoman — it was around this time they dropped the “Grandma Wolf” altogether and began to call her “Wolfwoman”. That was when I first heard the gossip about the Colonel and the Wolfwoman. Charlie said they’d had a thing going for years — common knowledge. That was why the late “Mrs Colonel” had kicked her out all those years before. And now they were like husband and wife up there, only she wore the trousers. There was talk of the Colonel’s dark moods, how he’d shut himself up in his study all day sometimes, and of Cook’s tantrums whenever things were not done just so. It was a world I could not be part of, a world I did not belong in.
I tried all I could to interest them in my life at school. I told them about how we’d all heard Miss McAllister and Mr Munnings having a blazing argument because he refused to light the school stove, how she’d called him a wicked, wicked man. She was right too. Mr Munnings would never light the stove unless the puddles were iced over in the school yard, unless our fingers were so cold we couldn’t write. He shouted back at her that he would light the stove when he thought fit, and that anyway suffering was part of life and good for a child’s soul. Charlie and Molly made out they were interested, but I could tell they weren’t. Then one day down by the brook, I turned and saw them walking away from me through the water meadows holding hands. We’d all held hands before, often, but then it had been the three of us. I knew at once that this was different. As I watched them I felt a sudden ache in my heart. I don’t think it was anger or jealousy, more a pang of loss, of deep grief.
We did have some moments when we became a threesome again, but they were becoming all too few and far between. I remember the day of the yellow aeroplane. It was the first aeroplane any of us had ever seen. We’d heard about them, seen pictures of them, but until that day I don’t think I ever really believed they were real, that they actually flew. You had to see one to believe it. Molly and Charlie and I were fishing down in the brook, just for tiddlers, or brown trout if we were lucky — we’d done no more salmon poaching, Mother had made us promise.
It was late on a summer evening and we were just about to set off home when we heard the distant sound of an engine. At first we thought it was the Colonel’s car — his Rolls Royce was the only car for miles around — but then we all realised at the same moment that this was a different kind of engine altogether. It was a sound of intermittent droning, like a thousand stuttering bees. What’s more, it wasn’t corning from the road at all; it was coming from high above us. There was a flurry of squawking and splashing further upstream as a flight of ducks took off in a panic. We ran out from under the trees to get a better look. An aeroplane! We watched, spellbound, as it circled above us like some ungainly yellow bird, its great wide wings wobbling precariously. We could see the goggled pilot looking down at us out of the cockpit. We waved frantically up at him and he waved back. Then he was coming in lower, lower. The cows in the water meadow scattered. The aeroplane was coming in to land, bouncing, then bumping along and coming to a stop some fifty yards away from us.
The pilot didn’t get out, but beckoned us over. We didn’t hesitate. “Better not switch off!” he shouted over the roar of the engine. He was laughing as he lifted up his goggles. “Might never get the damn thing started again. Listen, the truth is I reckon I’m a bit lost. That church up there on the hill, is that Lapford church?”
“No,” Charlie shouted back. “That’s Iddesleigh. St. James.”
The pilot looked down at his map. “Iddesleigh? You sure?”
“Yes,” we shouted.
“Whoops! Then I really was lost. Jolly good thing I stopped, wasn’t it? Thanks for your help. Better be off.” He lowered his goggles and smiled at us. “Here. You like humbugs?” And he reached out and handed Charlie a bag of sweets. “Cheerio then,” he said. “Stand well back. Here we go.”
And with that, off he went bouncing along towards the hedge, his engine spluttering. I thought he couldn’t possibly lift off in time. He managed it, but only just, his wheels clipping the top of the hedge, before he was up and away. He did one steep turn, then flew straight at us. There was no time to run. All we could do was throw ourselves face down in the long grass. We felt the sudden blast of the wind as he passed above us. By the time we rolled over he was climbing up over the trees and away. We could see him laughing and waving. We watched him soaring over Iddesleigh church tower and then away into the distance. He was gone, leaving us lying there breathless in the silence he’d left behind.
For some time afterwards we lay there in the long grass watching a single skylark rising above us, and sucking on our humbugs. When Charlie came to share them out we had five each, and five for Big Joe, too.
“Was that real?” Molly breathed. “Did it really happen?”
“We’ve got our humbugs,” said Charlie, “so it must have been real, mustn’t it?”
“Every time I eat humbugs from now on,” Molly said, “every time I look at skylarks, I’m going to think of that yellow aeroplane, and the three of us, and how we are right now.”
“Me too,” I said.
“Me too,” said Charlie.
Most people in the village had seen the aeroplane, but only we three had been there when it landed, only we had talked to the pilot. I was so proud of that — too proud as it turned out. I told the story, several embellished versions of it, again and again at school, showing everyone my humbugs just to prove all I’d said was true. But someone must have snitched on me, because Mr Munnings came straight over to me in class and, for no reason at all, told me to empty out my pockets. I had three of my precious humbugs left and he confiscated them all. Then he took me by the ear to the front of the class where he gave me six strokes of the ruler in his own very special way, sharp edge down on to my knuckles. As he did it I looked him in the eye and stared him out. It didn’t dull the pain, nor I’m sure did it make him feel bad about what he was doing, but my sullen defiance of him made me feel a lot better as I walked back to my desk.
As I lay in bed that night, my knuckles still throbbing, I was longing to tell Charlie about what had happened at school, but I knew that everything about school bored him now, so I said nothing. But the longer I lay there thinking about my knuckles and my humbugs the more I was bursting to talk to him. I could hear from his breathing that he was still awake. For just a moment it occurred to me this might be the time to tell him about Father, and how I’d killed him in the forest all those years before. That at least would interest him. I did try, but I still could not summon up the courage to tell him. In the end all I told him was that Mr Munnings had confiscated my humbugs. “I hate him,” I said. “I hope he chokes on them.” Even as I was speaking I could tell he wasn’t listening.
“Tommo,” he whispered, “I’m in trouble.”
“What’ve you done?” I asked him.
“I’m in real trouble, but I had to do it. You remember Bertha, that whitey-looking foxhound up at the Big House, the one we liked?”
“Course,” I said.
