Young Phillip Maddison (40 page)

Petal was different from Mavis. Although Petal was the same age, she was like someone grown up, yet decent, as grown-ups were not, as a rule. Mr. Newman was decent; so was Uncle Hugh, when he was not in a sneering mood. Petal played the piano almost as well as one of the records of Father’s gramophone. She did not hit wrong notes and then laugh, like Mavis did, or Doris did—only Doris did not laugh, she merely went back and tried again, being a plodder on the piano, as Amelia Bigge next door, L.R.A.M., who taught her, said.

It was true, too, for water-lilies in the Lake Woods belonging to the Dowager Countess did fold themselves up at evening, and slowly go down under water. The Lake Woods were enclosed in a high barb wire fence, with a tall locked iron gate at either end, set in the midst of the forest; but he and Desmond had crawled underneath the lowest strand, and explored the lakes. They had had to hide, when they saw the bailiff walking above the rhododendrons at the side. There were four lakes, the largest and deepest being at the top. On one bank of this was a decaying boathouse. The other three lakes lay below it, one feeding the other along little stone channels nearly covered with ferns and mosses. The lakes were very secret, Phillip had not mentioned them, even in code, in his diary.

As Petal’s voice ended Phillip swung down from the elm, using his hands only, branch under branch, to strengthen his muscles and to practise for any emergency when he was climbing trees. Then tip-toeing through the house, he crept into the front room, and stood still on the brown-and-yellow patterned carpet. Petal, her black hair tied with the red bow at her neck, and brushed straight down her back, was sitting quite still at the piano.

“Hullo,” he said.

Petal looked round swiftly, and gave him a smile of her eyes, which were dark like her hair.

“I hoped you would come, I saw you up the tree,” she said in a clear level voice. “Will you sing one of your songs, if I play the accompaniment, Phillip?”

The voice and the smile disturbed him. Though she was his cousin, she was also mysterious. He was a little awkward, being wary. He did not know that her feelings were making him feel as he did. Mother had said that girls grew up quicker in hot climates, that was why Petal, although three months younger than Mavis, looked much older.

“Oh, I can’t sing, I’m no good at it. They wouldn’t even have me in St. Mary’s choir when I tried! I can’t read music, either. I am a failure, you know.”

“You have a natural ear, and your voice is very sweet, Phillip.”

He shrugged his shoulders. “It’s throaty. It’s going to break, I think, any moment now.”

“Are you sure? It’s a pure treble. But perhaps you want it to break?”

“Well, sort of.” He went pink, and lowered his gaze.

“Then you ought to sing while you can. Anyway, I like it as it is. Perhaps you don’t practise enough?”

“Why should I? I tell you, my voice is no good. Please sing one of your green songs.”

Petal laughed lightly. “My green songs? Oh, you mean
Grieg.
”

Phillip frowned. Perceiving that she had embarrassed him, she said, “I think that a very good description, you know. They
are
green songs! Of course they are! Grieg loved the country, particularly the mountains, which are green on the slopes all the year. They are not parched, as in Cape Province. Music is coloured, you know. Don’t you feel that some sounds are brown, others red, or blue, or green?”

“Why yes, do you feel like that, too? I thought I was silly, to think that!”

Sympathy lit their faces. A friendship was made.

“Will you practise singing, if I play for you every morning?”

“Well, I shan’t be here much longer, you know. We are going away to Beau Brickhill the day after tomorrow. Do you know Polly and Percy?”

“No.”

“Well, they are your cousins too. Why don’t you come with us? They have a piano. I sing ‘The Maiden of the Fleur-de-Lys’, a duet, with Percy.”

“Is Polly nice?”

“She’s all right.”

“Only all right?”

“I dunno. Why do you ask?”

“I thought you were supposed to be sweet on her.”

“Me?”

“Yes. Do you kiss her?”

“No, of
course
not!”

Phillip became very shy. He felt drawn to Petal; and went away. It was a spidery feeling somehow.

*

Tommy arrived on his new bicycle. After inspection of this road racer, which had low, dropped handlebars, Phillip and he went for a ride. Phillip intended to go only so far as Fordesmill; but when they got there he saw some soldiers in khaki, sitting on horses which drew, among baggage waggons, some wheeled green field guns. He learned that it was a battery of the Royal Field Artillery from Woolwich, going by road to camp.

Free in the brilliant August sunshine, the boys followed beside the column for a while, then sped on ahead, lured by the thought of the reaper-and-binder in the harvest fields, of rabbits running out of the corn being cut and stooked. Away, away, into the everlasting summer day! Spokes faintly flashing as they hummed over tarred roads, seeking the white dust of new horizons!

The mirrored coolness and quiet of the Fish Ponds drew Phillip down to the sandy water edge. Here, under the burning blue heat of the sky, lay the unmoving wraiths of the pines, joined base to base with the actual trees rising upon the sloping banks. No sound came from their dark green crowns, except the thin high notes of the goldcrests seeking, with beaks scarcely thicker than pine-needles, the tiniest gossamer spiders who had drifted there with the drying of the morning dew.

“Tommy, look!”

Phillip pointed to the sight of hundreds of fish, with pale red fins, lying just under the surface at the far end, where white posts and rails guarded the sandy lane. And among the rudd were larger fish, floating brown-gold with scales as big as beech-leaves,
basking in the sun, their back fins and curling tails glistening above the surface.

“Carp! The foxes of the water! And my God, there’s the King Carp, the Fox of All!”

Among them lay a fish quite three feet in length. It was said to be one which no angler could catch, so cunning that it blew water from its mouth to wash bait off hooks, including green broad bean and small boiled potato. Never did float of quill or cork glide away gently, to slide under aslant and disappear, when the King Carp was feeding.

“They’re all basking in the sun!”

Phillip remembered an article in
The
Field,
which recommended a fine line to be cast among surface carp, a line fragile as horsehair, lightly greased to float, to lie across water-lily leaves and dangle, just over one curled edge, a thin red worm well-scoured. Phillip knew where such worms were to be found in the Backfield, in the moss attached to tindery railway sleepers, which lay half-buried, an old track for carts to the ballast heap.

Afire with piscatorial ambition, the boys sped back the way they had come. Phillip’s idea was to borrow Father’s fly-rod, stored in the loft over the bathroom, and some of his tackle hidden in the japanned uniform trunk laid on the joists of that secret and forbidden place. Followed by Tommy, down the slope to Shooting Common he tore, past the Falcon Inn where was a tame magpie, the wind thrumming in his ears. Without pause they reached the market town, now noisy with horses and guns, and soldiers with bandoliers, puttees rolled the opposite way to those of the marching men, and spurs upon their heels. Onwards through the town, passing the yellow motorbuses, rivals to the red Thomas Tilling buses, with petrol-electric system. The new buses never broke down climbing the hill from Cutler’s Pond, and could be beaten only by the hardest thrusting upon rat-trap pedals. There were other omnibuses as well, the Generals, which raced the others, often with steam shooting in geysers from their radiator caps. Sometimes by hanging on to the rail at the back it was possible to be towed on the flat, but you had to do it when the conductor was on top, collecting fares. It was tricky, too, for if the bus swerved suddenly, or ran too close to the raised grassy bank on the left of the road, you might easily come a cropper.

Phillip and Tommy stopped at the wooden shop below Cutler’s
Pond, for ginger pop and broken biscuits. Phillip explained to Tommy, outside, that it was the dearest little shop in the world. It was part of a minute weather-boarded cot, standing on the edge of the Randisbourne brook, beside the road. Father liked the shop, too; he used to go there to see the dame, as he called her, before he was married, on his Starley Rover. There were jars of sweets on the counter, satin cushions or pralines, toffee-apples, Pontefract cakes of licorice, gelatine discs which quenched thirst, black aniseed balls which soon turned brown when sucked, and then white when you were half through—and in the very middle, when the ball was only so big as a Carter’s Little Liver Pill, was a caraway seed, curved like a tiny wooden crescent moon. There were hundreds-and-thousands, millions of red, white, and blue dots that were as small as dust-shot used for snipe.

Did Tommy know how dust shot was made? He would never guess. Well, dust-shot was made by dropping a ladle of molten lead from a great height into a water tank. The lead broke into drops of different sizes as it fell, and when the tank was drained, pellets lay there. They were sifted, and the tiniest sold as dust shot, to scare birds in fruit orchards, and also for snipe, which zigzagged as they flew up, and “so would require a wide pattern of shot to encompass them.” Father said there used to be snipe in the meadows beside the Randisbourne; but building was creeping up from London, and the snipe had all gone.

“Even in this old-world place, you see, a new red-brick building is going up. Let’s see what the notice board says.”

“‘New and improved’ building! I like that! A gin palace, that’s all it will be, Father said. Now Tommy, please don’t laugh at the old woman in the shop, she is very very old, remember, and a friend of my Father’s.”

Phillip opened the door by the brass latch. Immediately a string, knotted many places where it had broken, was pulled down on a pulley hanging from the low ceiling, and a weight attached to the other end dropped on a brass shell-case from the Boer War, to give notice of a caller. As far back as he could
remember the old woman had always been sitting behind the counter when he had opened the door, so the gong-like warning seemed a bit unnecessary.

“Good morning,” said Phillip, raising his cap. “I hope you are in the best of health. I see they are building next door to you. A pity the old place is changing so. I expect they’ll be cutting down all the trees next, which will be another pity. Two bottles of ginger pop, please, and a ha’poth of broken biscuits for two.”

Tommy had a threepenny bit, which he called a tickey. Tommy was standing treat.

“Aye,” said the old woman. “You med not see I no more soon, dear. ’Tis all comin’ down hereabouts. They give I notice, ’tis the ground landlord a-doin’ of it.”

She had always worn the same flat and shapeless straw hat, over a face of brown wrinkled skin, with inflamed and dropped lower eyelids. Her hands were thin like claws, and although her voice croaked, she was always very kind to every child, calling them ‘dear’. Father said her tiny cot probably stood beside the stream when highwaymen fled past after robbing people on Blackheath. It was of board, painted originally cream, and the pantiles of the sloping roof were grey and yellow with lichens.

They drank the ginger beer quickly, unable to make it last. The biscuits would last all the afternoon. Saying good-bye, they cycled on slowly home.

Phillip had not felt so serious as he had pretended about change; he had spoken like that to impress Tommy, an echo of his father. All the same, the idea remained; and on the way back, he was a little disturbed to see that it was actually true. The trees along the road
were
being cut down! Men with axes were cutting round the bases of some, while others were sawing with long whippy jagged two-handed saws. The boys watched the first elm falling. The road was going to be widened, drains were to be laid, electric trams were to run all the way to Cutler’s Pond! Also, said the foreman to whom they spoke, a big new Tilling’s Omnibus depot was to be built in one of the fields. And down by Fordesmill, a new theatre was being built, bigger than any other, to be called the Hippodrome.

*

Phillip said goodbye to Tommy at the junction of Randiswell Lane and Charlotte Road, and hurried up the hill to tell the news to his mother. As soon as he got home he saw at once that
something serious had happened. Mavis and Doris, with Petal and Kimberley, were sitting very quietly together in the front room. Petal and Kimberley looked as though they had been crying.

“What’s up? Where’s Mother?”

“She’s next door, Phillip, with Grannie. Something awful’s happened.”

“What? Don’t sit there staring! Tell me!”

“Grannie’s been taken ill. The doctor has just gone, and is coming back this afternoon.”

“Good Lord. She promised me two shillings for my holiday money, only yesterday!”

“You would think only of yourself at a moment like this, wouldn’t you?”

“Is she very ill, then?”

“Yes, she is. She’s had a stroke, so there!”

“Well, there’s no need to be nasty about it. I can’t help it.”