Making It Up (2 page)

This meant Mrs. Leech had to be as nice as she possibly could, which was quite an effort for her. And she couldn't criticize, because she didn't know the first thing about children and didn't want to. Shirley had once heard her say to a friend that it took a particular mentality to look after children; you knew exactly what was implied by that. All right, Shirley had thought, but if you're so jolly superior then you can leave me in peace to get on with what I do. No interference in the nursery—that was the rule, and Mrs. Leech knew it all right.

Shirley had had Jean from six months. From birth is best, of course; before Shirley there had been a Swiss nurse, and Shirley sometimes felt that she'd left some faint, unwelcome imprint. But Jean was her creation, through and through—obedient, lovely manners, and of course always beautifully turned out. Shirley made most of Jean's clothes herself: cotton frocks with ric-rac round the sleeves and hems, and silk smocks for parties. She was a good needlewoman, and that made her smugly pleased; some of the other nannies were hopeless. From time to time Mrs. Leech would come humbly with a hem to be taken up, or a zip to be replaced; she couldn't sew for toffee.

Jean loved Shirley more than she loved her mother. If she hurt herself, it was to Shirley that she ran; on Shirley's evening out, she cried herself to sleep. Mrs. Leech must have been aware that things were so, but there was no indication that this bothered her. Presumably she saw it as the price you pay, which of course it was. Personally, Shirley couldn't imagine handing your child over to someone else like that, but then she couldn't actually imagine having a child of her own anyway. She couldn't imagine getting married, not that there weren't men who showed an interest, now and then.

The Buchan nanny had up and married a Lebanese last year. Goodness knows how she met him—you didn't get Lebanese coming to the YWCA, for heaven's sake. They said it was probably on the beach in Alex, Sidi Bishr, he must have come up and talked and one thing led to another. She'd always been a bit of an odd girl, and none of them saw her anymore now. Apparently she'd had a little boy, and of course he'd be half Lebanese. Shirley knew she couldn't take that, personally, but each to his own.

There was a naval officer coming round now, chivvying the orange sellers off the ship and asking visitors to go ashore. He gave Shirley a smile and said Suez was quite a place, wasn't it? So she smiled back and agreed.

Actually, she wouldn't be sorry to see the back of Suez. It was jam-packed with the Army, trucks and stuff everywhere, the gharries could hardly get through, they'd had a fine old time trying to get the luggage down to the quayside. The gharry driver had wanted some ridiculous price, and when the porters turned up there was a trunk missing and Mrs. Leech was getting in a proper state until they discovered it had been left at the guest house. They'd had to spend last night somewhere after the train journey from Cairo, and all the good pensions were booked up, so Mrs. Leech was forced to take a room at this tatty place, Greek-run, horrible food, and the sheets were none too clean. There'd been no hot water for baths, and Shirley didn't dare let Jean touch the milk. There was a prewar poster for Thomas Cook stuck up in the entrance hall: “Going Home? Save Time, Money and Worry by booking at Cook's. They will ship, forward or insure all baggage, furniture . . . even Polo Ponies, at the best rates. . . .” Well, nobody was going home now, that was for sure, not for the duration anyway.

Shirley couldn't remember England very well. At least, it wasn't so much that she couldn't remember it as that she could no longer imagine being there. The place was in her head still, a series of sharp images: a blowy Cornish beach, the brown moquette suite in her parents' front room, children sailing toy boats on the Round Pond, chestnut trees in flower, glinting wet streets. It was in her bones, too, of course—one was English, and that was that. But somehow a shutter had dropped down between that time and this, so that the norm was now heat, dust, the raucous street life of Cairo, and all those routine accompaniments to living out here. The insistent daily perils of dirt, disease, sun: these dictated a routine that was now second nature, she knew no other way to be.

Everyone out here got ill at some point—malaria, dysentery, typhoid, sandfly fever—and lesser afflictions waited to pounce on a daily basis. You never went anywhere without the iodine and the mercurochrome—every cut or graze or insect bite was likely to turn nasty, surging into a ripe infected wound within hours. Children were forever being daubed with yellow iodine and scarlet blotches of mercurochrome. You couldn't trust the water, let alone the milk. Shirley saw to it that Jean never drank anything that hadn't been boiled. She had her own little meths stove in the nursery and insisted that the milk was sent straight up to her. And of course you slept under a mosquito net and were strict about hand washing and no fingers in mouths. Even so, Jean had had scarlet fever and a bout of impetigo, and of course endless tummy upsets and styes and boils. Shirley was good with boils. She could do hot poultices, draw the thing gradually day by day until it was ready to burst, and then you squeezed firmly and the pus came oozing out, a yellow worm. Mrs. Leech had had to come to her once when she had one on her behind. Sometimes when Shirley saw her done up to the nines to go out to some do, all lipstick and scent and low-cut frock, she would get a picture of Mrs. Leech facedown on the bed, with her bare white bottom and the angry red hillock of the boil.

And then there was the sun, the remorseless battery of the heat. Sun hats, Nivea cream, trying to keep children in the shade. They all got sunburn and prickly heat. But that too had become normal, the way of the world; she could not now conjure up cool English weather, or rain. It was as though all that had slipped away, an unreal and unreachable place, much like the time that was equally unattainable: before the war.

Before the war, they went to England every summer. Long summers of rented houses in Cornwall or Devon, and spells in London, and visits to the Leeches' relatives. Shirley saw her parents quite a bit, and her sisters. But even then she had begun to feel a bit strange with her family. Distanced. She no longer talked like them, she knew that. Her parents and her sisters had the voice of suburban London, they had what Mrs. Leech called “an accent.” Shirley's had gone, all but. She spoke like her employers and their friends. Her family's speech sounded unfamiliar now, and bothered her in some disturbing way, as did the speech of servicemen she met on her days off, at the YWCA, at whist drives there and tea dances. She was no longer used to that speech, she had been for years among those other voices, those of the Leeches and before them the Arlingtons, who were grander, actually, titled, and who had a huge house in Belgravia, and all the children's clothes from Harrods, dozens of smocked dresses and little tweed coats. Shirley had been the nursery maid then, and Nanny Collins was a dragon, which was partly why she had left, but also she had thought it would be exciting to travel, so when she saw Mrs. Leech's advertisement in
The Lady
she had written off at once: “Cairo. Summers in England. Large house and garden in best residential district. One six-month-old baby girl.”

The parameters of her life were now the house in Zamalek, the Gezira Sporting Club to which she walked with Jean most afternoons, and the YWCA on her afternoon off. In the summers now they went to Alex, except for this year—this year was different, the Germans had put the kibosh on Alex for this year. And she hadn't had her afternoon off for the last three weeks, what with the packing up and Mrs. Leech running round like a scalded cat getting the train reservation and visas and stocking up with all the things they'd need on the ship.

Well, Shirley would make up for it in Cape Town, by all accounts. There was a YW there, people said, and lovely cinemas, better than the Cairo ones. She often went to the Kasr el Aini cinema with a bunch of other nannies; they'd seen all the Deanna Durbin films and
Gone with the Wind
and they never missed a Bob Hope, but it was a bit of a flea pit; you always felt you might pick something up. In Cape Town they didn't let the natives in, apparently.

Everyone was on board now who should be, and everyone off who shouldn't, and the gangplank was being taken up, so there wasn't anything much to watch on deck. She took Jean down below for a wash and found Mrs. Leech fussing that there wasn't anywhere to hang her frocks. She was moving out of their cabin. She'd got round the Purser and wangled a two-berth cabin that she was going to share with Mrs. Clavering. The Clavering nanny and Jamie were going to come in with Shirley and Jean, which would be much better, according to Mrs. Leech, because the nannies could then take it in turns to stay with the children in the evenings, after they were in bed. And of course Mrs. Leech and Mrs. Clavering wouldn't be woken up first thing or in the night, but that was passed over. The Purser was going to find somewhere else for the retired teacher; he was really terribly sweet and helpful, Mrs. Leech said.

Sometime in the night they sailed. Jean woke up early and said, “Everything's moving outside, Nanny,” and yes, there was blue water sliding past and you could feel the thump-thump of the ship's engines. Shirley felt a little rush of excitement just as she used to before the war when they sailed from Port Said for home, and you saw the statue of the man who built the Canal, and then the Mediterranean beyond. Actually, the Red Sea looked much the same, except at the moment it was flatter, she could remember the Med tipping up horribly. Up on deck, she could see a long gold-brown line of land, but during the day that disappeared and there was just sea. A great bowl of sea and sky, with them in the middle.

It was funny how quickly you settled down to being on board, as though there'd never been any other kind of life. There was a routine, right from the start. Mealtimes ruled—the bell for eight o'clock breakfast, and then later first- and second-sitting lunches and in the evening children's high tea at six, which included nannies, and dinner for everyone else at seven. After dinner, there was always a bit of a party going on in the bar, and Mrs. Leech was in on that right away, of course, done up in one of her best frocks—oh, she was having a high old time, she'd always loved the trips home and back, prewar, and this might not be P&O but she was making the most of it, all the same. Shirley was much in demand with the mothers who hadn't got nannies, she and Nanny Clavering, to keep an ear out for their children while they were up in the bar, or in the lounge where people played bridge: “Oh Nanny,
would
you be an angel—she's fast asleep, but if you could just have a peep at her every now and then . . .”

So she and Nanny Clavering played box and cox, one staying down with the children while the other had a bit of time off—joining a whist game with some of the NCOs or just sitting on deck where it got nice and cool after dark. Pretty dark, too, what with the blackout so there couldn't be any lights on and you kept falling over things and you weren't supposed to smoke, not that Shirley was a smoker anyway. But it was lovely up there, in the night, with just the sound of the engines and the sea, and when there was a moon you got these great paths of light over the water, rippling away into the distance. There were always quite a few people up there, leaning over the rail—smoking, unless one of the ship's officers was around. Shirley liked to find a place on her own where she could just watch the sea and listen to it and feel the wind on her face. But she never stayed that long; Jean might wake, and while Nanny Clavering was there, of course, it would be Shirley she'd want, and no one else.

The families were all together, at one end of the main deck, in cabins at either side of the long passage. There were bathrooms in the middle, and you had to queue up, and then it was a saltwater bath you got, so not much joy there. Shirley preferred to stick with the hand basin in the cabin, and give Jean an all-over wash out of that. A terrible run on the toilets, all the time.

At the far end of the accommodation deck there were people who were going home, right the way round the Cape and into the Atlantic—six weeks it would take and they said it would get really rough once you were round the Cape, and there were lots of U-boats in the Atlantic. There was a chance of them off the east coast of Africa, apparently, on the way to Cape Town, which was why there had to be lifeboat drill, and life jackets, and blackout, just in case, but it wasn't nearly as bad as the Atlantic, they said, and nothing like the Mediterranean, which the convoys hadn't been able to use since 1940. Thank goodness they'd be getting off at the Cape; two weeks of this would be quite enough, thank you very much. The ship was jam-packed, you were cheek by jowl all the time, which made the heat even worse, and the food left much to be desired. Powdered milk, and the tea wasn't made with boiling water, you got the leaves floating on top. No, she wouldn't want to be going home, to be honest. And anyway it was pretty wretched there by all accounts, what with rationing and shortages and the Blitz. Shirley's letters from her parents and her sisters were just one long moan.

There was a handful of families who were going home, and some military personnel—a few officers who were being retired or sent back for some reason, and very popular they were with Mrs. Leech and her friends, seeing as how this was such an all-women party. Of course there were the naval officers too—Mrs. Leech and Mrs. Clavering were always having a drink in the bar with one or another of them. And on the lower decks there were the other ranks, who of course didn't count so far as Mrs. Leech was concerned. Actually, there was a medical orderly who was ever so nice; Shirley had got talking to him when he was helping with the organized games they had on deck for the children every morning. He was in charge of some soldiers who were being invalided down to hospitals in the Cape, men who'd lost arms or legs in the desert battles, or been blinded, poor things—horrible, you didn't like to think about it. They were brought up on deck and you saw them lying around and some of the children would go and talk to them—the men seemed to like that. That was how Shirley had met the orderly. He had asked Jean to come over and say hello to this soldier who'd had his foot blown off, and then they chatted a bit, Shirley and the orderly. He'd been in Egypt since 1940, at the military hospital in Cairo, he was an ambulance driver in civilian life, he came from Devon. He had a country sort of voice, but actually Shirley rather liked that. It made her think of holidays by the sea when she was a little girl. He gave Jean a Cadbury's chocolate bar from the NAAFI, which was a real treat, and he told them there'd been flying fish that landed on the deck yesterday, which they'd missed, so he promised to come and find them next time it happened.