Silent Music, page 3
Only a couple of weeks later, one dull, wet Saturday or Sunday afternoon – it definitely must have been a weekend, because Dad was at home – Ruth was playing with her doll, while Dad read her a story about a wicked witch and a princess. All of a sudden, Shirley came screaming out of the little bathroom which was tacked on to the end of the kitchen and sat down heavily on a chair, gasping: “The baby, the baby!” Ruth was frightened. There was no sign of any baby, except her doll, and nobody had ever spoken of one. Dad ran out of the house, calling “I’ll go and phone!” as he went. He came back a little later, and soon after that an ambulance arrived. While Ruth stood watching, Shirley was carried moaning out of the house, and soon afterwards the vehicle drove off, its bell clanging and its light flashing against the darkening sky.
Indoors Dad paced up and down for a while, looking drawn and anxious. He then went out to the telephone again, this time taking Ruth with him. He made lots of calls, speaking quickly, with uncharacteristic agitation, while Ruth sat on the cold stone floor of the telephone box watching the lamplighter reach up with his long pole to light the gas lamp on the corner of the street. Then patiently she drew patterns on the dirty, steamed-up window panes. At last Dad put the receiver down and attempted to explain. “Shirley is not well, Ruthie, that’s why she’s gone to hospital; I’m sure she’ll be better soon. I’m taking you to stay with Nan and Grandpa. You’ll like that, won’t you?” Ruth nodded her agreement, since that clearly was what was anticipated, but she didn’t know whether she would like it or not.
Although it was clear that the decision had already been taken, it worried her for the rest of the day because, apart from the scant impressions of Nan and Grandpa on that first holiday by the sea, her more recent reminiscences of them were cloaked in gloom and sadness. However, after a long and serious discussion with her soft toys in bed that night, she satisfied herself that it would probably be all right. It was bound to be better than going to Mrs Cox, the childminder across the road, and because Dad had said he would be coming too, she would be safe. Ruth took Shirley’s departure perfectly calmly: as long as her dad was there, she did not miss her mother, though she was still mystified as to why she had gone away in an ambulance, crying about a baby.
3
The morning after Shirley’s dramatic departure, labouring under the effects of an anxiously wakeful night, John Platt struggled wearily up the road to the Tube station, bearing the still somnolent Ruth and the various indispensable soft toys over his left shoulder while, in his right hand, he held a hastily prepared suitcase containing nightclothes for himself and some random items of Ruth’s wardrobe. He carried his burdens into the clanking lift and then, once below ground, along the winding, yellow-tiled Victorian passages to the dingy platform. He clutched them to him in the swaying, clattering Tube train which lulled Ruth into a deeper sleep. She did not wake until they emerged from the escalators onto the platform at Liverpool Street, where he set her down on her feet.
Whimpering at the noise and bustle of the main-line station, she clung to him, immobilizing him, while he scanned the signboards. Still clinging to him in the thick smoky atmosphere, she look around at the jostling crowds and then put her hands over her ears to shut out the din of shunting engines, bursts of steam, screeching whistles, rumbling trolleys and the cadaverous voice from above which filled the space with unintelligible announcements.
While her father made yet more phone calls and she began to understand where she was and what was happening, her anxiety gave way to an impatient excitement. She knew that she had travelled by express train before, most likely when she went to the sea, but did not remember it at all distinctly, unlike those short suburban rides with Shirley when they went to visit Granddad Reggie. Many a time as she and Dad had stood watching the trains steaming through the cutting at the end of the street, she had begged him to take her on a proper train on a long journey out to the country. At last it was going to happen!
They boarded the train, installing themselves with their miscellaneous entourage of soft toys in an empty compartment only seconds before a short, sharp whistle blast signalled their departure. The jerking movement of the train easing itself out of its slumber like a waking dragon sent a thrill of adventure coursing through Ruth’s small person, though she held her father’s hand tightly. This was a step into a new world, the unknown world of grown-ups.
Beyond the end of the station, houses and shops and churches were all moving away from her with increasing speed. And with them went those ugly walls and spires standing alone, like blackened monsters among grass and weeds on bare patches of land, their windows gouged out and blind and their steeples pointing heavenward for no apparent purpose. Whenever she asked what they were, the answer was always the same: “That was the Blitz.” “What was the Blitz?” she would ask. “In the War,” they said, leaving her none the wiser. Today those monsters and all other signs of the city were being swiftly replaced by fields and trees, cows and horses, as the train followed its inevitable trajectory, cutting a swathe of city hubbub, speed and urgency through the timeless tranquillity of meadows, woods and sleepy villages.
Dad laughed when, pointing at the houses and ruins, she exclaimed, “Look, they are all getting left behind!” He said that it was the train that was moving, not the fields and trees. If she kept her eyes open, he said, sooner or later she would see the farm where he used to go and stay with his cousins. She turned from the window and stared at him in disbelief. It had never occurred to her that he had lived anywhere other than in their little house in London or stayed with anyone other than Shirley, and perhaps Nan and Grandpa, who were, of course, his parents. What’s more, it was unbelievable that he had cousins, possibly lots of people whom she had not only not met but never even heard of, and that these unknown people had a farm in the country with fields and animals, where Dad, her dad, had stayed when he was a boy. This unsuspected revelation, so nonchalantly imparted, left Ruth mystified. It took her some time to digest all the implications, not least the idea that Dad had once been a boy. She had never imagined that he had been a boy. What had he been like?
Having pondered this unlikely information for a while, she then began to ply her father with questions. How many cousins did he have? What were their names? Dad scratched his head, trying to remember; there were so many of them: Muriel, Abe (short for Abraham), Eva, Rick, Bartholomew and Freddie. How many cows, pigs, chickens, horses? she then persisted, urgently wanting to find out more and more. She kept her eyes fixed on the window, waiting impatiently for the farm to come into view. “Is it that one?” she would ask at every sighting of a house, barn, shed or pigsty, and then: “I think I can see it over there!” she would announce optimistically, scarcely able to conceal her disappointment when Dad shook his head. He promised to tell her when to expect it, but her impatience knew no bounds as she focused intently on every object that came into view for fear of missing something of such profound significance. “How much longer will it be?” she asked every five minutes until, after an eternity, Dad said that they were very near.
When at last the longed-for farmhouse came into view, she drank in every detail of its thatched roof and black, tar-covered walls. It was old and decrepit, with a pronounced list to the left, but that did not concern Ruth: to her it was beautiful, and the sight of it carried her away with wonder that such a grand property should belong to her relatives, even though she had only just discovered their existence. She registered every cow and horse in the field between the railway and the house, and would have counted every hen in the yard had she been given the chance. She craned her head round to try to look back down the line, watching constantly in the hope that the farm might reappear, while the train sped on through the day, oblivious of the preoccupations of its young passenger.
At the end of the line, Nan and Grandpa were waiting for them on the platform. Grandpa swept his little granddaughter off her feet, whirling her high in the air with a whoop of delight. Then Nan bent down and enveloped her in a warm, furry hug, smelling of mothballs and a faint, fascinating trace of perfume.
“How’s my dear little Ruthie?” she asked with such concern that Ruth discovered, to her intense joy, that here were people, other than Dad and Shirley, to whom she belonged. Grandpa was exactly as she remembered him, funny and bouncy, but Nan was different. Perhaps this was the real Nan, whom she had never yet known properly – gentle, sensible and quietly confident. This was certainly not the distant, anxious person whom she vaguely remembered from those days at the sea, nor the grieving elderly lady with the tear-stained face who had come to stay when Evelyn had gone off to live with God.
As they came out of the station, John drew in a deep breath of the cold, clean air and exhaled it with slow satisfaction. Ruth did the same in imitation. “Tha’s a difference, that is!” Dad exclaimed. “Tha’s real pure. You don’t get air like that in London. It’s all fog there, even on a fine day you’re breathing in tons of soot.” Ruth was struck by the way he spoke: it was unlike his normal London way of speaking. The words came out more slowly; they sounded softer, friendlier, less formal, less correct. He was speaking like Nan and Grandpa, perhaps in recognition of his homecoming. Grandpa regretfully explained that Nan had dissuaded him from bringing the bike and sidecar to meet them as she was afraid that Ruth would be scared of it, so they would have to join the queue for the bus instead. “Bike” and “sidecar” as yet meant nothing to Ruth. For her part, she was happy to stand at the bus stop with her hand in Nan’s and watch the changing sky while the adults talked.
“It was a boy…” Dad was saying, and then muttered something about Shirley being very upset and having to stay in hospital for some weeks. Ruth took little notice of their conversation, because she was too absorbed in the radiance of the sunset to bother with it, knowing that she would not understand it in any case. She had never seen such beautiful colours. High above her head the sky was already black, and through it, the twinkling stars, like bright pinpricks of light in a velvet cloth, were beginning to wink and flash their opening eyes at her. As she lowered her head, she saw the darkness of advancing night being held at bay by the vibrant colours of sunset as they descended the sky in clear, luminous bands, merging and fusing and melting into each other. Black yielded to purple; purple to a streak of clear bright blue; blue to turquoise and turquoise to emerald green, which was then absorbed in a ribbon of palest yellow. The yellow gained the intensity of ochre as it dropped into a brilliant layer of fiery orange. On the horizon this sank into the bed of rich, glowing crimson on which the entire sky rested.
Against the crimson, the buildings of the old city, its towers, spires and bare trees, were a single fused line of black silhouettes. Ruth was bewitched; all the colours of her paintbox were there, more startling in their brilliance, more striking in their clarity, more elusive in their evanescence. Her paints were so clumsy by comparison.
“What a little dreamer!” a voice said in her ear. She turned round to see Nan’s bemused face, lit by the glare of the headlights of the bus, which had drawn up at the stop during her reverie.
It was dark by the time they arrived at Nan and Grandpa’s house. Although Ruth had struggled to keep her eyes open on the bus, extreme tiredness overcame her, with the humiliating result that she had to be carried into the house and taken straight up to bed, fighting sleep with tears of angry frustration. She had travelled so far and seen so much, yet there remained so much more that she wanted to see and discover before that remarkable day came to an end. However much they reassured her that there would be time for all that in the morning, she wanted to see it now, at once. In the event she had no choice; she was fighting a losing battle with sleep as her eyes closed, leaving her with lingering impressions of a creaking gate, moist fresh air, a wide doorway and a well-lit hall. Above all, it was the pervasive smell of that house that she carried to bed with her, a fascinating aroma, spicy and fragrant: it was Nan’s faint perfume mixed with other unidentifiable smells. Later she recognized them as the traces of wax polish, wood shavings, tobacco and sweet-briar pipe in the special combination which gave that very ordinary house its distinctive character.
4
Grandpa came into the bedroom the next morning, bearing a cup of hot chocolate and singing “Wake up, brown eyes, sleepy head!” to the tune of ‘Half a Pound of Tuppenny Rice’. He put the mug down on the bedside table, drew back the heavy threadbare curtains, noisily pulling their brass rings along the rod and revealing a grey, wintry sky. Ruth woke up blinking in the aggressive light which hurt her eyes and inspected the room: beside her bed there stood a wicker chair and the small table bearing her chocolate mug. There was a tall wardrobe at the end of the bed by the window. The only other piece of furniture was a marble washstand with a backing of dark-green tiles. Grandpa watched patiently while she found her bearings. “Come on, little Miss Brown Eyes, drink your cocoa and then come downstairs, there’s a something waiting for you!”
When he left the room, Ruth’s reaction was not to drink her cocoa or to dress, but to rush to the window. There was indeed a great deal waiting for her, though not perhaps what Grandpa intended – waiting for her there, outside the very window, without her even having to set foot on the stairs. She was half expecting to see familiar walls on all sides and the backs of other houses across a tiny patch of yard. She stood on tiptoe to look over the window sill, but overbalanced in amazement at the scene which met her gaze. There was not a house in sight, except in the far distance. She peeped out again. Beneath the window a long lawn sloped away from the house down to a wooden fence, beyond which was a vast ploughed field. The few signs of habitation were so far away on the other side of the field that their rooftops were visible only as splashes of red among the trees on the edge of the field.
Along the line of the garden fence stood a row of tall bushes and trees, now bare and black, and down each side of the lawn ran narrow flower beds, also bare and black but neat and tidy. The border on the right ran up as far as the back wall of the house, but the one on the left came only halfway up the lawn because the space nearer the house was taken up by a small wooden shed, onto which a rather chaotic corrugated lean-to had been appended. In the middle of the lawn there was a strange hump with a wheelbarrow standing by it. Two spades leant against the wheelbarrow, which meant that somebody had already been out working in the garden while she slept.
The cold floor of the unheated room drove her back into bed to sip her cocoa, but from time to time she dashed back to the window to make sure that the view had not by some mischance been magicked away. She dressed in the same intermittent manner. Normally she was proud of her ability to dress herself quickly and correctly, apart from the occasional problem with an awkward button, but today she struggled into her clothes willy-nilly, so that when she appeared in the kitchen doorway having negotiated the steep staircase, the three adults, all sitting round the table, had difficulty in concealing their amusement. Nan rose and came over to greet her with a kiss and a hug.
“Well, my dear little Ruthie,” she said with that same warmth of affection that she had shown at the railway station, “aren’t you a clever girl to dress yourself all on your own! Let me help you to get these silly clothes the right way round.” She swiftly rearranged the errant clothing, tied a small blue apron around Ruth’s waist and sat her on a chair at the table where breakfast was laid for her.
Dad, Nan and Grandpa were drinking a sweet-smelling coffee, presumably made from the coffee bottle with its picture on the label of a man by a tent with his servant. Dad and Grandpa must have been out working in the garden, down by the hump that Ruth had seen from the window.
“I’ll give you another hour or so, Father,” Dad said, “and that should finish it and then I’ll be off.”
“Good job we had that old shelter, bor, saved our lives a good few times, that did,” Grandpa rejoined, “but I shall be glad to see it go. Let’s hope we won’t ever need another one.”
Ruth turned from one to the other. “What was it?” she enquired timidly.
“That was our shelter in the War, little Miss Brown Eyes,” Grandpa answered her, “and don’t you worry your littl’ self about that.” Then he changed the subject, adding with a sly wink in her direction, “As soon as your dad and I have finished filling in that old Anderson, I’ll show you what I’ve got for you in my shed.”
When the men had gone out, Ruth remembered that Dad had said that he must be off; what did he mean?
“Where are we going?” she asked Nan. “Where are we going today?”
“Nowhere that I know of,” Nan replied.
“But Dad said he must be off,” Ruth persisted. “And I don’t want to go back to London!” she added vehemently.
“Ah, of course,” said Nan cautiously. She left the sink where she had been washing up and came to sit beside Ruth, then feeling her way by degrees into the subject, she began tentatively: “Your daddy has got to go back to London, Ruthie; he has to go to work.” She fell silent for a moment and then said: “And as your mummy is not well, we hoped, Grandpa and I, you might like to stay here with us for a little while. We’d love that, we would!”
