Everyone Brave Is Forgiven(7)
“You played Mother like a cheap pianola.”
“And now you will have to get your job back, or at least pretend. Either way you’ll be out of my hair for the Michaelmas Ball.”
“The ball, you genius, is to be held after school hours.”
“But you will have to be in the countryside, won’t you? Even your mother will realize that there’s nobody here to teach.”
Mary considered it. “I will get you back for this.”
“Eventually I shall forgive you, of course. I might even let you come to my wedding to Geoffrey St John. You can be a bridesmaid.”
They leaned shoulders sociably and watched the darkening city.
“What was it like?” said Hilda finally.
Mary sighed. “The worst thing is that I loved it.”
“But I did see him first, you know,” said Hilda.
“Oh, I don’t mean kissing Geoffrey. I mean I loved the teaching.”
“What are you cooking up now?”
“No, really! I had thirty-one children, bright as the devil’s cuff links. Now they’re gone it feels rather dull.”
The blacked-out city lay inverted. Until now it had answered the evening stars with a million points of light, drowning them in extroversion.
“Why not the kiss?” said Hilda after a while. “What was wrong with Geoffrey’s kiss anyway?”
October, 1939
WHEN WAR WAS DECLARED, Tom Shaw decided to give it a miss. It wouldn’t last in any case—the belligerents on both sides would pull back from the brink, as children did when encircled in the playground by a mob calling for a fight.
It took skill, at twenty-three, to be sad. The trouble was, he noticed things that made one melancholy. He noticed the way the West End players didn’t bother to remove their stage paint if the matinée was close to the evening show—so that when one went out in Soho one might see Rosencrantz drinking a half-pint, in a corner, in the indifferent afternoon light. He noticed the neat cropped circle achieved in grass whenever a horse was tethered on common land by a fixed length of chain—the circle being of invariant geometrical perfection notwithstanding the temperament of the beast: whether skittish or placid, obstinate or obliging.
His colleagues at the Education Authority had all left to join the Army, and his supervisor had ascended to the Ministry to help coordinate the evacuation. Tom seemed to be the only man in London who did not think the war an unmissable parade lap, and so he’d been given a school district to run instead. A man might celebrate the promotion if he didn’t have the gift for noticing that the schools were empty.
He took a walk at dawn. High up on Parliament Hill the blackberries were in season, bursting with the bright sweetness they gave only in the best years. In any other October, children would have got to these bushes first. Tom took off his hat and filled it.
He looked down on his new district as it awoke: the scholastic subdivision of Kentish Town and Chalk Farm. Marking his fiefdom’s northerly limit was the railway, steam rising even now as the day’s first batch of evacuees went west. The Regent’s Canal was his southern border, busy with barges lugging goods from the docks. Within these bounds no child would learn its letters, no teacher would receive her wages in a manila envelope with its tie closure sealed in red wax, no chalk would be brought forth from its Cretaceous slumber to be milled into rods and applied to blackboards, unless he himself ordained it. Glancing left and right to make sure he was alone, he raised an imperious arm.
“Learn, little people! I command it!”
His mouth was full of blackberries, the effect rather undermined. He let his arm drop and wondered what he ought to do with the day. The only school-age children who remained were the frankly unappealing: the crippled and the congenitally strange, those the country folk wouldn’t accommodate. The Negro children, too, of course—only a few had been evacuated, and those were already staring to trickle back. The evacuation was a beauty contest in which the little ones were lined up in church halls and the yokels allowed to pick the blonds.
Tom was left with twenty mothballed schools and a light scattering of the children who were either too complicated to educate, or too simple. To cheer himself up he practised the trick of flipping a blackberry from his hand to strike his elbow and bounce into his mouth. He was no good at it at all—he didn’t get it once in six attempts—but he was sure he would improve with time. It was the great folly of war that it measured nations against each other without reckoning talents like these.
He lifted his eyes. Beyond his zone, London sprawled away to the rank marshes in the east and the white marble walls in the west. Along the line of the Thames they were testing a flock of miniature zeppelins. Tethered on cables, these were supposed to offer a variety of protection, albeit of a vague and unspecified stripe. The balloons’ snub noses swung left and right in the fickle breeze, giving them the anxious air of compasses abandoned by north.
Tom took his hatful of blackberries with him down the hill, back into the furious city with its mushrooming recruitment posts. Strangers met his eye, anxious to nod the new solidarity. YOUR COURAGE, YOUR CHEERFULNESS, YOUR RESOLUTION, read the billboards that used to hawk soap.
It was still only eight—too early for the office—so he went back to his garret. Home was a sitting room with two bedrooms attached, in the converted attic of a town house off the Prince of Wales Road. The attic had been converted—as his flatmate Alistair Heath put it—in the same way the Christians had converted the Moors. It seemed to have been done at the point of a sword, leaving the continual threat of reversion. Winter brought leaks and bitter drafts, summer a canicular heat from which slight relief could be obtained by running one’s head under the tap of the little corner kitchen.