(5/20)Over the Gate (17 page)

The recipe, cut from a daily paper, made grisly reading to those used to the normal ingredients of pre-war puddings. No brandy, stout, fresh eggs or butter appeared in the 1943 recipe. Instead, such dreadful items as grated carrot, margarine, dried-egg powder and—the final touch of horror—'a tablespoonful of gravy browning to enrich the colour,' figured on the depressing list of ingredients. But times were hard, and years of privation had blunted the sensibilities of even the most fastidious. With much cheerfulness the ladies set about their preparations for making 'An Economical and Nutritious War-Time Christmas Pudding.'

Dozens of pudding basins, each bearing their owner's name on adhesive tape stuck on the base, waited on the long tables. Little paper bags bearing treasured ounces of currants and sultanas, mixed spices, breadcrumbs and two precious fresh lemons, jostled each other near the enormous yellow mixing bowl from the Vicarage. By ten o'clock the ingredients were being stirred zealously by half a dozen helpers, most of them elderly women, for the majority were doing war work of some sort or other. Mrs Willet busdy greased the basins with carefully-hoarded margarine papers, listening to the chatter about her.

'We'll set the copper to
Very Slow,
' said the vicar's wife, 'and then it should be perfectly safe until tea time. Mrs Willet's staying until eleven-thirty, to make sure it's simmering properly and then the rota begins.'

It had been arranged that one or other of the W.I. members should look in every hour to see that all was well, and to top up the water in the copper if it was getting too low. Christmas puddings were too precious to be left entirely to themselves for such a length of time.

By eleven, the puddings were ready for immersion. Every household in Fairacre had one, and some had two or three, standing in the water. This was the Women's Institute's practical help towards Christmas, and very well planned the organisation had been.

'Here's Mrs Pringle's,' said Mrs Willet, bearing a stout two-pounder to the copper. She peered underneath the basin to read the big black capitals on the tape, before letting it down gently beside the others.

'Then that's the last,' said the vicar's wife thankfully. 'Just time to have a cup of tea before we knock off.'

It was very quiet when they had gone. Mrs Willet took out her knitting and sat by the humming copper. The clock said twenty past eleven and she had promised to stay untd half past. As she knitted, she read the list of names pinned on the wall by the copper. During the afternoon she saw that Mrs Pringle and Mrs Jarman were due to call in. Both worked in the mornings and had been unable to stir their own puddings this year.

'2.30—Mrs Pringle'

'3.30—Miss Parr'—only that would be her maid, Mrs Willet surmised, and

'4.30—Mrs Jarman'—who would no doubt rush back to her family in time to fry the inevitable chips on which that ebullient household seemed to exist.

'5.30—Anyone welcome.' This was when the puddings would be lifted out and handed to their lucky owners. Mrs Willet had promised to help with this chore.

At twenty-five to twelve she lifted the lid, noted with relief that the water was bubbling gently, checked all the switches, wrote a note to the next pudding-minder saying:

'25 to 12. Everything all right.

Alice Willet.'

and made her way back through the village.

At five-thirty a throng of women crowded the steamy hall collecting their basins and lodging them in shopping baskets, string bags or the baskets on the front of their bicycles.

'Got the right one?' called Mrs Jarman to Mrs Pringle, as she watched that lady peering under the basins for her name. 'Bet you've got more fruit in yours than the rest of us!'

Mrs Pringle sniffed and ignored the quip. Depositing her pudding in the black depths of her oilcloth shopping bag, she passed majestically from the hall without deigning to reply.

The fantastic sequel to the pudding-making session might never have been known to Fairacre but for an unusually generous gesture of Mrs Pringle's.

As Christmas Day approached she heard that a large party of the Jarmans' friends were proposing to spend the day next door.

'My heart fair bleeds for poor Jane Morgan,' said Mrs Pringle lugubriously to her son John. 'She'll be crowded out of house and home, as far as I can see. I've a good mind to invite her round here for Christmas dinner.'

Neither Corporal Pringle nor Private Morgan were to be given Christmas leave. Mrs Pringle's sister and a schoolgirl niece, much the same age as John, were coming from Caxley for the day, and as the sister and Jane Morgan knew each other well it seemed a good idea to ask their neighbour to join the party. Jane Morgan was gratefully surprised, and accepted.

The pudding simmered all the morning, and most delightful aromas crept about the kitchen, for there was a duck roasting in the oven as well as the 'nutritious war-time' delicacy on top of the hob. Mrs Pringle and her sister had a good gossip, their children played amicably with their new presents, and except for the ear-splitting racket occasioned by the crowd next door, the benevolent spirit of Christmas hung over all. At twelve-thirty Jane Morgan appeared, thankful to be out of her noisy home, and they all sat down to dinner.

The duck was excellent. The pudding looked wonderful. Mrs Pringle plunged a knife into its gravy-darkened top and cut the first slice.

'Mum!' squeaked John excitedly. 'There's something shining!'

'Sh!' said his aunt. 'Don't give the game away! Perhaps it's a sixpence.'

Mrs Pringle looked puzzled.

'No sixpences in this pudding!' she said. 'In any case, I don't hold with metal objects in food. I always wraps up anything like that in a morsel of greaseproof.'

She put the first slice on a plate for Mrs Morgan. There was certainly a suspicious chinking sound as the pudding met the china surface.

'When I was little,' said Jane Morgan, 'we used to have dear little china dolls in our Christmas pudding. No bigger than an inch, they were! With shiny black heads. We used to put them in the dolls' house, I remember.'

But Jane Morgan's reminiscences were being ignored, for all eyes were on the pudding. There was no doubt about it, there were a great many shiny foreign objects among the other war-time ingredients. Mrs Pringle's breathing became more stertorous as the slices were cut. She sat down heavily in front of the last plate, her own, and then spoke.

'Just pick it over before you take a mouthful. I reckons someone's been playing tricks on us.'

Spoons and forks twitched the glutinous mass back and forth, amidst amazed cries from the assembled company. When they came to count up the foreign objects they found no fewer than two dozen mother o' pearl shirt buttons.

Mrs Pringle said not a word, but opened a tin of pineapple chunks instead.

Late that night, when the Jarmans' company had roared away and the children had been chased to bed, Mrs Jarman met her landlady in the communal kitchen. Jane Morgan was in her husband's dressing gown, her wispy hair was in a small pigtail, and her teeth had been left upstairs in a glass of water. She was busy filling a hot water bottle.

'Had a good time?' asked Mrs Jarman boisterously. 'We have. Never laughed so much since I came here.'

'That'th nithe!' said Mrs Morgan politely. 'Yeth, I enjoyed it next door, but there wath thomething wrong with the Chrithtmath pudding.'

Mrs Jarman drew in her breath sharply.

'What was up with it?' she enquired.

'It wath absolutely Stuffed with thirt buttonth,' said Mrs Morgan, wide-eyed. 'Mithith Pringle wath dumbfounded."

'Shirt buttons!' echoed Mrs Jarman. She broke into peals of noisy laughter.

'Ah well,' she gasped, through her spasms, 'that should please the old trout! She told me once that she saved shirt buttons!'

Still laughing, she made her way upstairs, followed by her mystified landlady.

Mrs Willet straightened herself and patted my garden gate.

'Well, Miss Read, that's the story. Of course, it was all over Fairacre before Boxing Day sunset. Jane Morgan let it out, in all innocence, and the village was fair humming with the news.'

'Did Mrs Jarman ever admit it?' I asked.

'Never! Swore she never knew a thing about it, but it was her all right. I should know—I remember the pudding list. '2.30 Mrs Pringle' It wouldn't be her. '3.30 Miss Parr' That was her Annie that popped in then, as law-abiding as they come, and wouldn't dream of doing such a thing. '4.30
Mrs Jarman
' And '5.30 All welcome.' Don't need much working out, when you come to think of it.'

She bent to pick up her basket, and stroked Tibby affectionately.

'I will say though,' she continued, 'that Mrs Pringle minded her manners a bit more after that, when she and Mrs Jarman got together. Ah, she was real mischieful, was Mrs Jarman. You couldn't help liking her.'

Mrs Willet gazed, with unseeing eyes, down the Fairacre lane, her mind on times long past.

'I still miss them, you know, them Londoners. I liked 'em—and always shall. It was good to see them again this afternoon. Took me back to the old days. Say what you like about 'em, Miss Read, Londoners are a larky lot! A real larky lot!'

9. Outlook Unsettled

A
S
so often happens when term begins, the weather became idyllic. Great white clouds sailed indolently across pellucid blue skies, and warm winds from the south replaced the sneaky little easterly one which had harassed us throughout most of the Easter holidays.

One warm afternoon, in late April, we propped the door of the schoolroom open with an upturned flowerpot and did our best to turn our attention to learning Robert Bridges'poem 'Spring Goeth All in White.' It seemed an admirable choice in the circumstances, for white narcissi spdt their heady fragrance from the window sill, white daisies, gathered by the children, fillled three paste pots on my desk, and an early cabbage white butterfly opened and shut its wings against the south-facing Gothic window.

Nevertheless, it was uphill work. Languor, born of unaccustomed heat, engulfed my class. Shirt necks were opened, sleeves rolled up, jerseys peeled off and stuffed in desks, and the sing-song country voices stumbled heavily through this most tripping of spring lyrics.

Sleepiest of all was young Richard, not yet five, who was spending the day with us while his mother paid a necessary visit to the hospital in our county town. It is not easy to get someone to mind a child in a small village, and I often get urgent requests asking me 'if our youngest can come along with his brother for an hour or two." If it is possible—and it usually is—we all enjoy the newcomer's company, and it gives him an insight into school routine before he takes the plunge himself later on.

Richard lolled on the desk beside bis brother Ernest, who nudged him occasionally and whispered severely to him, with no noticeable result. As we battled on, Richard amused himself by blowing large glassy bubbles from lips as red and puckered as a poppy petal. Ernest, scandalised, bent down to remonstrate.

'Leave him alone, Ernest,' I said mildly. 'He's tired. Perhaps he'll fall asleep.'

'In school?' cried Ernest, deeply shocked.

'Why not?'

Ernest, still looking affronted by my slackness, drew himself up, folded his arms and applied himself sternly to the task before him, ignoring the indolent and shameful child beside him.

Everywhere in the room were emblems of spring. The weather chart for April showed a number of umbrellas, depicting the rainy weather during the holidays, with arrows pointing fairly consistently to the north-east. But a row of triumphant suns, like yellow daisies, blossomed in the last six or seven squares, and the arrows were now happdy reversed.

Across the back of the room ran a frieze of spring flowers. Crocuses, daffodds, tulips, and a large number of new species, as yet unknown to Messrs Sutton and Carter, had been cut out of gummed paper and affixed by every hand in the class. Many a fat thumb went home in the afternoon bearing an indented ring round it made by hard-worked school scissors. It was, as the seed catalogues say, 'a riot of bloom' and a very colourful addition to our dull walls.

A new spring poster to encourage savings, showing a bird and its nest, brightened the door between the two classrooms, and the nature table was laden with wood anemones, primroses, violets, sprays of young honeysuckle leaves, a few early coltsfoot and dandelions, and a splendid pot of horse chestnut twigs thrusting out green hands in all directions.

Hard by, the glass fish tank glimmered with shiny frog-spawn, for all the world like submerged chain-mad. The tiny dots were already beginning to turn into commas, and before long the children's patience would be rewarded by the sight of a myriad thrashing tadpoles. Nothing could be more suitable, I told myself again, than 'Spring Goeth All In White' for such an afternoon.

But, there was no doubt about it, those eight exquisite lines were really more than the children could manage in the circumstances. I felt impatient and cross at their laziness, but was loth to spoil the poem for them by bad-tempered bludgeoning. In the midst of this impasse, young Richard raised himself, stretched short arms each side of his rumpled head, and said clearly: