The Lion Tamer’s Daughter (3 page)

Another good thing was the women at the orphanage found out about my eyes. At Southampton they'd decided I was stupid, but it was because I couldn't see the blackboard. These women gave me some spectacles. They didn't take me to the oculist to have my eyes tested, but they had a box of spectacles which people had given them and they tried them out until they found some which weren't too bad. These ones were too big and they kept falling off so we kept them on with sticking plaster behind my ears, and at least I could see the blackboard now.

The third good thing was that there was a case of old books in the matron's room. Until I'd got my specs I couldn't really read much except the large-print books for small kids, and there weren't enough of those, anything like. Now I could read real books, though I still had to get my nose pretty well up against the paper. The books were the sort people give away when they're clearing out, mostly not for kids at all—old
Pears' Cyclopedias
, or
Travels in the Holy Land
, or
My Life in Merchant Banking
—even those I'd read. But others were stories about things like explorers in the jungle, or young ladies who didn't want to marry the person their parents had chosen for them and ran away and got a job as a kitchen maid and fell in love with the under-gardener who her parents wouldn't approve of at all, only his father's really a lord who's not going to approve of him marrying a kitchen maid, and he's got his own reasons for not letting on who he really is, but they both find out in the end so they can get married after all. I used to read it all as if it was dead true. I even read H. G. Wells's
The Time Machine
as if it was true.

I was nine when the war started. This was the Second World War, against Hitler's Germany. I didn't understand anything about it. Nothing much changed for a bit, and then everything did. First, the people my grandmother worked for decided to go to America till the war was over, so she had to get a new job. While she was doing this my father's ship was sunk and he was drowned. Then the women who ran the orphanage said London was going to be bombed and we'd all got to move out, only they couldn't find anywhere for us to stay together. I remember one called Mrs. Wimbush going round actually wringing her hands and telling everyone she couldn't think what was going to become of us.

What became of me was that my grandmother got a job cooking for a rich woman in a big house somewhere out in the country called Theston Manor. My grandmother went for an interview and explained about me, and this woman—Miss van Deering, her name was—said I could come too provided I kept out of her way. I think she might have had her own reasons. Because of the bombing they were sending all the kids out of London—thousands and thousands of them. Evacuees, they called them, and they were going round telling anyone out in the country who'd got a bit of spare room that they'd got to have some. There was certainly plenty of spare room at Theston Manor, but Miss van Deering didn't want any evacuees there if she could help it. She was the sort who likes everything just so, and a pack of London kids wouldn't have been that. Maybe she thought that having one kid there already would mean she didn't have to have any more. If so, it worked, or something did. The people looking for places left her alone.

2. Miss van Deering

I was at Theston Manor for the rest of the war and a bit after, until I was sixteen, and if you'd asked me afterward I'd have told you that in all that time I'd met Miss van Deering just the once. Really met, I mean, to talk to, alone. I saw her in church on Sundays because she passed quite close on her way out. We sat at the back and she had her own pew, third on the right in front, and of course we used to wait for the gentry and the people who wanted to think they were gentry to leave first. As she passed us she used to nod and give a tight little smile to show she'd spotted we were there. She was a small woman, plump but neat, with silver hair and a soft round face. I used to think that she was like one of those cats you see, sitting in the sun with its paws drawn in under it, looking as if it's got the world exactly the way it wants and you'd better not mess around with it.

The time I met her happened like this. It would have been early in the summer holidays and I must have been coming up twelve. When the weather was OK I was supposed to help Mr. Frostle in the garden, if you could call it helping, because I was pretty useless at anything he gave me to do. Tuppence an hour I was paid, and I wasn't really worth that, but it meant I finished up with three shillings at the end of the week. Then I had all the long afternoons to fill up. Theston village wasn't that far off, where I went to school, and there were other kids amusing themselves down there, but I wasn't the sort to make friends, so I was on my own.

Now I'd better try and give you some idea of what the Manor was like. It was the sort of place you see in ads for Bentleys and Jaguars and such. There were twenty-eight bedrooms, not counting the attics where me and my grandmother slept. Heaven knows how many windows there must have been, and the wardens were very strict about the blackout, even right out in the country like that. And quite right too. A couple of villages away some people had been coming out of a dance one night and they'd left the door open too long and a German bomber who'd lost his way must have spotted it and dropped his bombs to get rid of them, and three houses got hit.

A lot of the rooms at the Manor they just took the electric bulbs out of and locked the doors, but the passages and such they had to do something about, and there wasn't anyone to go round taking the blackout down every morning and putting it up again in the evening, so it just got left up except in three or four rooms and a few other places. So there was this huge old house, all so dark that even on sunny days you had to switch the lights on to get around it. Not that the lights were that good, what there were of them. The electrics had been put in way back, before the First War, and they ran off their own generator, which the fuel was rationed for and the ration wasn't enough, nothing like. So they'd taken out a lot of the bulbs in the passages too, and the rest were about ten-watt, and you had to remember to turn them off as soon as you'd gone by or you were in dead trouble.

And, my, was it cold in winter! But that's not part of the story, which I'd better get on with.

One of the rooms which was kept locked because it hadn't got any blackout was the servants' hall. This was where the maids and footmen and such used to have their meals and sit around when they weren't wanted. There'd been nine of them living in the house in peacetime, Kitty told me, just to look after Miss van Deering, not counting the ones who came in by the day from the cottages and the village. They'd all gone off to war work now. The servants' hall was along a corridor from the kitchen, at the back of the house and down from the main ground floor. I'd gone in there once to help my grandmother carry something she needed, and while she was rooting around looking for what she wanted she opened a cupboard and I saw it was full of books. I didn't dare ask, for fear of being told no (that was the sort of kid I was), but I spotted where she put the key after she'd locked up, and as soon as she was into her after-dinner nap (that's what people call lunch now) I sneaked back for a look. They were just what I wanted, the same as I used to read at the orphanage, romances about gentry pretending to be servants and such, as well as a lot of old thrillers. So after that as soon as dinner was over I used to tell my grandmother I was going for a walk, which she was all in favor of as she couldn't bear to have me hanging around in the kitchen lounging and scratching, as she put it, and she had the idea that fresh air was good for me. “Never did your father any harm, out on the ocean briny,” she used to say, knowing quite well he'd spent most of his time in a hot little galley frying stuff up for the crew. I'd put on my boots and my waterproofs if it was wet and start off on my walk, but as soon as I was out of sight I'd slip into one of the sheds and read. There were acres and acres of garden, mostly gone wild, with apple stores and an icehouse and log sheds and a coach house and potting sheds and stables and kennels and tool rooms and so on. I found a place up some stone stairs above the stables where there was a pile of musty hay and a window and nobody ever came. Winter I'd read till it got too dark to see. Summer I'd work out how many pages I'd get through before I'd got to go in and do my homework and mark the place and stop when I got there.

“Well,
you
ought to have a bit of an appetite,” my grandmother used to say when I got in. Luckily, reading gave me just as much of an appetite as walking would have done, for my grandmother's food, at any rate. She was a really good cook. She couldn't bear to cook food which wasn't interesting to eat. Day after day we'd have meals better than any I've tasted since, and all out of the scraps of stuff she could get hold of in wartime. Apart from that I don't know that I can give you much idea of her. Like I've said, she was short and fat and had this bad hip. I don't know that she was fond of me, but she looked after me and did her best for me because that was right, but I don't remember that I ever had a hug from her or anything like that. She liked things to be very definite, so she knew where she was. Later on, when I took to reading to her, she used to bother about why anybody should go to the trouble of making stories up, and whether there wasn't something not really right about listening to what amounted to a pack of lies.

I must have found the books in the servants' hall the autumn before the time I met Miss van Deering, and by then I'd read most of them twice over. That morning it was sheeting with rain, and while we were finishing up breakfast Kitty came in for her usual cup of tea and said since there wasn't any point in my going out to help Mr. Frostle I might as well come and give her a hand in the library. Kitty was an old woman who'd worked in the house more than fifty years. She'd been an under-housemaid to start with, living in, but then she'd married the groom, Benjie Prior, and gone to live with him in one of the cottages. Now she just came in to clean the bits Miss van Deering used, her bedroom and so on, and a little room right above the kitchen, called the office, which was her day room. Doing the library was something else.

Getting on three years I'd been living at Theston, but I'd never been up on the main floor, where the library was, and all the other big rooms. In the old days, when there'd been all those servants, the gentry liked to pretend they weren't there except when they needed them, so the servants had their own steep wooden stairs running up at the back of the house, with doors through to all the floors, so they could get in and out to do their work when the gentry weren't around. To get up to our bedrooms in the attics we used the back stairs as far as the second floor. Someone had decided it wasn't worth doing the blackout any further, so they'd shut the stairs off from then on, and we had to slip through and on up some other stairs to the third floor, which the gentry had used for guests who didn't matter that much, and for their own kids. Then one more lot of stairs took us on to the attics. (This is all going to come in later.)

Well, Kitty took me up from the kitchen into this long dark passage on the first floor, switching the dim lights on and off as she went by. Then she took a key from a shelf and unlocked a great big door and switched the light on until she'd drawn the curtains and opened the heavy wooden shutters behind them. The furniture was covered with dust sheets and all the shelves had newspapers on them, folded to cover the tops of the books and hang down the spines. It was still really summer outside, but it looked like winter in the room with the wet gray light falling on the snowy dust sheets. There were three tall windows with old blotchy mirrors between them. Otherwise it was bookshelves all the way round, from the floor almost to the ceiling, except for the door and a huge fireplace opposite the windows. Each stack of shelves had a letter at the top. We were doing stack C.

There was a special stepladder, made of shiny wood with brass fittings, so you could reach the top shelves. Kitty didn't like the ladder, which was why she needed me to help. I climbed up to the shelf she showed me and passed the newspapers down to her, carefully, so they could be used again. Then the books, one at a time. They were all bound in leather and felt heavier, more solid, than the books I was used to, and they had their names on the back in gold lettering.

When we'd got the whole shelf down Kitty gave me a cloth and some special oil and showed me how to oil the covers so the leather didn't crack, while she looked through them one by one for woodworm and damp and checked that the little leather labels with the gold letters on weren't coming unglued. Then we put them all back in the same order they were in to start with. It took us the whole morning to do just two shelves. It sounds boring, but it wasn't. I really enjoyed it, handling those lovely old books and looking after them the way they needed. And I did it right, too, not the way I worked for Mr. Frostle. Kitty didn't have to tell me off once.

The first shelf, there were two volumes of something and three volumes of something else and six of something else, all different shapes and sizes. The second shelf started like that, but then it settled down and they were all the same. Of course I was reading the titles as I took them down, and halfway along I came to
Ivanhoe
, three volumes of it. I nearly fell off the ladder. I'd read it at the orphanage, but I'd never found out how it ended because the last fifty pages were missing. I didn't bother asking Kitty if I could read it because I knew she'd say no. These were gentry books, not for the likes of her and me. I tried sneaking the third volume off to one side, under a dust sheet, but Kitty spotted it and I had to pretend it had just got in there somehow.

We stopped for dinner, and then my grandmother took me in to Worcester with Benjie in the pony trap to do the shopping, so it must have been a Thursday. She and me had our tea in the kitchen at six. Then she would finish cooking Miss van Deering's supper and put it in the food lift and I'd work the rope, which took it rumbling up to a room called the office, which Miss van Deering was using as her living room while the war was on. There was no way you could have kept a room like the library warm in winter.