We Must Be Brave. Frances Liardet
lifted her arms for me to pull her top clothes off, obediently stepped from foot to foot so I could remove the knickers and long socks. Everything I did must remind her of her mother, and yet she said nothing. She was so small.
She sat gingerly down in the water. ‘Is it too hot?’ I asked, anxious. She shook her head. I should wash her hair, probably. But not tonight. Instead I washed her grubby hands, her grubby knees and neck with my own bath soap, and scooped water over her shoulders and back. Her skin was uniformly pale, dense, creamy. Perhaps I was wrong, and this bathtime was so new and peculiar that nothing about it recalled her mother.
She knew about the candle man long before she’d seen him. She used to hear him come whistling up the path, just after she’d been put to bed with her library books. He had a whistle like a blackbird. He always came on library day. Then one night she went downstairs for a drink of water. And her mother had said: This is Eric. He’s going to get some candles for your cake. ‘And he did this with his eye at me.’ Pamela gurned, trying and failing to close one eye without the other following suit. ‘And the next day we all went to Southampton. We put everything into a special kind of suitcase called a vast suitcase,’ she said. ‘When you go away for a long time, that’s what you need. A vast one.’
‘Vast means extremely big, Pamela.’
The bathwater lapped around her knees. She floated the face flannel on the water’s surface, poking it with a finger until it sank down. She wasn’t a fat child but she still had her baby’s chubbiness around the wrists. ‘Vast,’ she said again.
She didn’t know why they had to go to Southampton, why Eric couldn’t bring the candles to their house. But Mummy said they needed an adventure. They took a train, then a bus. Then they walked. Mummy was frightened of bombs, but the candle man said the bombers had already got everything they wanted from Southampton. ‘So we went to the hotel and took off our coats and cardigans. Mummy put me on a chair outside our room while she shouted at the candle man inside. We all went to bed in the cellar. And then in the morning I had to sit on the chair again. That’s why I went outside to watch the people rushing around. I was bored.’
I dipped my hand in the warm water and scooped it over her pale, round shoulders. ‘Promise me that if you’re bored here, you will stay where you’re put. Pamela …’ I tried to sound careless, conversational. ‘This candle man. Eric. I suppose he wasn’t a bit like your daddy, was he?’
She gave me a blank gaze. ‘Oh, I don’t have a daddy.’
‘Really? I thought everyone did …’
‘No. You can be excused from it, you know. Mummy told me. He decided not to be a daddy, and so he isn’t. He went off just after I came out. Do you know that babies come out of people, out of a wincy little hole that stretches?’
‘Goodness, Pamela!’ I had a sudden sharp image of a woman perched at a dressing table, throwing out the facts of life to her little child while lipsticking her mouth. ‘Yes, I do know that.’
‘Are you having a baby, Ellen?’
I gave a wavering laugh as the heat flooded my face. ‘I certainly am not. And it’s not a question you ask grown-ups, dear.’
‘You might be.’ She was unabashed, round-eyed. ‘They’re teeny when they start growing, like a little nut. So you could have one inside you and not know about it till you start being sick as a dog.’
‘That’s not a nice expression.’ I smoothed my hands over the pinafore I’d put on to bathe her. ‘I haven’t got time for babies, Pamela. Not with all you children to look after. Now let’s forget about all this silliness.’
I ran through phrases in my mind. Pamela, darling, your mother … Mummy … Pamela, sweetheart … I couldn’t get any further. It would have to be done tomorrow. Tomorrow or the next day.
Quite suddenly she started to grizzle, baring small, square milk teeth. Her tears fell into the cooling bath. Elizabeth came in with the vegetables for supper, filled the sink with cold water, cast a sombre eye on Pamela, and left the room again, saying, ‘Hens.’
I told Pamela she’d see the hens tomorrow, that she could feed them with Elizabeth if she wanted, but she shook her head, because hens were no good to her. I dried her and took her upstairs to dress, and met Hawley coming down to peel parsnips. The others were too darn comfortable to move, he said. ‘They’re the lazy branch of the family. No, truly they are. My dad says so.’
After supper I put Pamela back in my bed and told her a tale about a swan, one who kept her babies in the soft, white feathers on her back between her wings as she glided along a shining, dark-green summer river. They went for long, long adventures until Pamela grew drowsy.
PAMELA KEPT ME AWAKE for a large part of the night, a sleeper in almost perpetual motion. At six o’clock I was in the kitchen starting some bread when the telephone rang in the hall, the bell immediately drowned by thundering feet on the landing and Elizabeth’s hopeless cry, ‘Donald, you’re a plain old-fashioned disgrace!’ I heard Selwyn say, ‘Children, stop this bawling,’ but they took no notice and crowded noisily into the kitchen, Elizabeth following.
‘Donald refuses to have his hair cut,’ she announced.
I was pouring warm water into my flour. I looked up to see the older two were freshly shorn, the black-haired Hawley monk-like under his pudding-basin crop. For the first time I noticed the faintest dark down on his upper lip. ‘Hawley, you look very dapper,’ I said. ‘Donald, don’t you want to be as smart as your cousin?’
Jack, the elder of the two brothers and a russet boy, spoke for Donald. ‘He says we look like girls.’
Donald scuffed his feet by the range, his fringe in his eyes. Shorter, stockier and redder than Jack, he was a wayward Highland calf.
‘Really, Donald, dear. What sort of girl would have such a plain style?’
‘Mrs Parr, save your strength.’ Elizabeth scooped oats into a pan, her face creased with exasperation. ‘Donald won’t be told.’
The older boys sat down, their necks wet, the snipped hems of their hair still bearing the furrows of the comb. When I was fourteen, Elizabeth had cut my hair. She’d worked for Mr and Miss Dawes then, who looked after the children of the parish poor. I was older than these boys but I was nonetheless a parish child. So Elizabeth had clipped me and deloused me with gentle kindness.
I looked up, met her eyes.
‘I’ve never told Mr Parr, you know,’ I said quietly. ‘About my short crop.’
‘Of course not.’ She began to smile. ‘He doesn’t have to know everything.’
My corn goddess, Selwyn had said, when he unpinned my hair for the first time. So easy to worship you. He knew that Mother and I had fetched up in the Absaloms, but I had painted this era in broad brushstrokes, very broad strokes indeed. What corn goddess in her right mind would regale a suitor with stories of long-ago lice?
Just then Selwyn came into the kitchen. ‘Good morning, boys. I’ve been speaking to Cousin Hawley’s father. They’re all fit and well, although there’s no water and an awful lot of smoke.’
They were too proud to shed tears of relief but Hawley’s shoulders settled and Jack blinked rapidly. Donald gave a series of blowing breaths, a small bullock on a misty morning.
‘Donald won’t have his hair cut,’ I told Selwyn.
‘I know. The fearful row you made quite impinged on my telephone conversation. Donald,’ Selwyn commanded, ‘submit to a trim this evening and at Christmas I’ll take all you boys to Suggs’s in Waltham for a proper chap’s back-and-sides.’ He wagged a finger. ‘This is a gentleman’s offer, conditional upon meticulous obedience