Collected Stories

Matilda’s England

1. The Tennis Court

Old Mrs Ashburton used to drive about the lanes in a governess cart drawn by a donkey she called Trot. We often met her as we cycled home from school, when my brother and my sister were at the Grammar School and I was still at the village school. Of the three of us I was Mrs Ashburton’s favourite, and I don’t know why that was except that I was the youngest. ‘Hullo, my Matilda,’ Mrs Ashburton would whisper in her throaty, crazysounding way. ‘Matilda,’ she’d repeat, lingering over the name I so disliked, drawing each syllable away from the next. ‘Dear Matilda.’ She was excessively thin, rather tall, and frail-looking. We made allowances for her because she was eighty-one.

Usually when we met her she was looking for wild flowers, or if it was winter or autumn just sitting in her governess cart in some farmer’s gateway, letting the donkey graze the farmer’s grass. In spring she used to root out plants from the hedges with a little trowel. Most of them were weeds, my brother said; and looking back on it now, I realize that it wasn’t for wild flowers, or weeds, or grazing for her donkey that she drove about the lanes. It was in order to meet us cycling back from school.

‘There’s a tennis court at Challacombe Manor,’ she said one day in May, 1939. ‘Any time you ever wanted to play, Dick.’ She stared at my brother with piercing black eyes that were the colour of quality coal. She was eccentric, standing there in a long, very old and bald fur coat, stroking the ears of her donkey while he nibbled a hedge. Her hat was attached to her grey hair by a number of brass hat-pins. The hat was of faded green felt, the hat-pins had quite large knobs at the ends of them, inlaid with pieces of green glass. Green, Mrs Ashburton often remarked, was her favourite colour, and she used to remove these hat-pins to show us the glass additions, emphasizing that they were valueless. Her bald fur coat was valueless also, she assured us, and not even in its heyday would it have fetched more than five pounds. In the same manner she remarked upon her summer hats and dresses, and her shoes, and the governess cart, and the donkey.

‘I mean, Dick,’ she said that day in 1939, ‘it’s not much of a tennis court, but it was once, of course. And there’s a net stacked away in one of the outhouses. And a roller, and a marker. There’s a lawn-mower, too, because naturally you’ll need that.’

‘You mean, we could play on your court, Mrs Ashburton?’ my sister Betty said.

‘Of course I mean that, my dear. That’s just what I mean. You know, before the war we really did have marvellous tennis parties at Challacombe. Everyone came.’

‘Oh, how lovely!’ Betty was fourteen and Dick was a year older, and I was nine. Betty was fair-haired like the rest of us, but much prettier than me. She had very blue eyes and a wide smiling mouth that boys at the Grammar School were always trying to kiss, and a small nose, and freckles. Her hair was smooth and long, the colour of hay. It looked quite startling sometimes, shining in the sunlight. I used to feel proud of Betty and Dick when they came to collect me every afternoon at Mrs Pritchard’s school. Dick was to leave the Grammar School in July, and on the afternoons of that warm May, as Betty and I cycled home with him, we felt sorry that he wouldn’t be there next term. But Dick said he was glad. He was big, as tall as my father, and very shy. He’d begun to smoke, a habit not approved of by my father. On the way home from school we had to stop and go into a ruined cottage so that he could have a Woodbine. He was going to work on the farm; one day the farm would be his.

‘It would be lovely to play tennis,’ Betty said.

‘Then you must, my dear. But if you want to play this summer you’ll have to get the court into trim.’ Mrs Ashburton smiled at Betty in a way that made her thin, elderly face seem beautiful. Then she smiled at Dick. ‘I was passing the tennis court the other day, Dick, and I suddenly thought of it. Now why shouldn’t those children get it into trim? I thought. Why shouldn’t they come and play, and bring their friends?’

‘Yes,’ Dick said.

‘Why ever don’t you come over to Challacombe on Saturday? Matilda, too, of course. Come for tea, all three of you.’

Mrs Ashburton smiled at each of us in turn. She nodded at us and climbed into the governess cart. ‘saturday,’ she repeated.

‘Honestly, Betty!’ Dick glared crossly at my sister, as though she were responsible for the invitation. ‘I’m not going, you know.’

He cycled off, along the narrow, dusty lane, big and red-faced and muttering. We followed him more slowly, talking about Mrs Ashburton. ‘Poor old thing!’ Betty said, which was what people round about often said when Mrs Ashburton was mentioned, or when she was seen in her governess cart.

The first thing I remember in all my life was my father breaking a fountain-pen. It was a large black-and-white pen, like tortoiseshell or marble. That was the fashion for fountain-pens then: two or three colours marbled together, green and black, blue and white, red and black-and-white. Conway Stewart, Waterman’s, Blackbird. Propelling pencils were called Eversharp.

The day my father broke his pen I didn’t know all that: I learnt it afterwards, when I went to school. I was three the day he broke the pen. ‘It’s just a waste of blooming money!’ he shouted. He smashed the pen across his knee while my mother anxiously watched. Waste of money or not, she said, it wouldn’t help matters to break the thing. She fetched him the ink and a dip-pen from a drawer of the dresser. He was still angry, but after a minute or two he began to laugh. He kissed my mother, pulling her down on to the knee he’d broken the pen over. Dick, who must have been nine then, didn’t even look up from his homework. Betty was there too, but I can’t remember what she was doing.

The kitchen hasn’t changed much. The old range has gone, but the big light-oak dresser is still there, with the same brass handles on its doors and drawers and the same Wedgwood-blue dinner-set on its shelves, and cups and jugs hanging on hooks. The ceiling is low, the kitchen itself large and rectangular, with the back stairs rising from the far end of it, and a door at the bottom of them. There are doors to the pantry and the scullery, and to the passage that leads to the rest of the house, and to the yard. There’s a long narrow light-oak table, with brass handles on its drawers, like the dresser ones, and oak chairs that aren’t as light as all the other oak because chairs darken with use. But the table isn’t scrubbed once a week any more, and the brass doesn’t gleam. I know, because now and again I visit the farmhouse.

I remember the kitchen with oil-lamps, and the time, the day after my fifth birthday, when the men came to wire the house for electricity. My mother used to talk about an Aga, and often when she took us shopping with her she’d bring us to Archers’, the builders’ merchants, to look at big cream-coloured Agas. After a time, Mr Gray of the Aga department didn’t even bother to bustle up to her when he saw her coming. She’d stand there, plump and pink-cheeked, her reddish hair neat beneath the brim of her hat, touching the display models, opening the oven doors and lifting up the two big hot-plate covers. When we returned to the farmhouse my father would tease her, knowing she’d been to Archers’ again. She’d blush, cutting ham at teatime or offering round salad. My father would then forget about it. ‘Well, I’m damned,’ he’d say, and he’d read out an item from the weekly paper, about some neighbouring farmer or new County Council plans. My mother would listen and then both of them would nod. They were very good friends, even though my father teased her. She blushed like a rose, he said: he teased her to see it.

Once, before the electricity came, I had a nightmare. It was probably only a few months before, because when I came crying down to the kitchen my father kept comforting me with the reminder that it would soon be my fifth birthday. ‘You’ll never cry then, Matilda,’ he whispered to me, cuddling me to him. ‘Big girls of five don’t cry.’ I fell asleep, but it’s not that that I remember now, not the fear from the nightmare going away, or the tears stopping, or my father’s caressing: it’s the image of my parents in the kitchen as I stumbled down the back stairs. There were two oil-lamps lit and the fire in the range was glowing red-hot behind its curved bars, and the heavy black kettle wasn’t quite singing. My father was asleep with last Saturday’s weekly paper on his knees, my mother was reading one of the books from the bookcase in the dining-room we never used, probably The Garden of Allah, which was her favourite. The two sheepdogs were asleep under the table, and when I opened the door at the top of the stairs they both barked because they knew that at that particular time no one should be opening that door. ‘Oh, now, now,’ my mother said, coming to me, listening to me when I said that there were cows on my bedroom wall. I remember the image of the two of them because they looked so happy sitting there, even though my mother hadn’t got her Aga, even though my father was sometimes worried about the farm.

Looking back on it now, there was a lot of happiness, although perhaps not more than many families experience. Everything seems either dismal or happy in retrospect, and the happiness in the farmhouse is what I think of first whenever I think now of that particular past. I remember my mother baking in the kitchen, flour all over her plump arms, and tiny beads of moisture on her forehead, because the kitchen was always hot. I remember my father’s leathery skin and his smile, and the way he used to shout at the sheepdogs, and the men, Joe and Arthur, sitting on yellow stubble, drinking tea out of a bottle, on a day hay had been cut.

Our farm had once been the home-farm of Challacombe Manor, even though our farmhouse was two miles away from the manor house. There’d been servants and gardeners at Challacombe Manor then, and horses in the stables, and carriages coming and going. But the estate had fallen into rack and ruin after the First World War because Mr Ashburton hadn’t been able to keep it going and in the end, in 1924, he’d taken out various mortgages. When he died, in 1929, the extent of his debts was so great that Mrs Ashburton had been obliged to let Lloyd’s Bank foreclose on the mortgages, which is how it came about that my father bought Challacombe Farm. It was a tragedy, people round about used to say, and the real tragedy was that Mr Ashburton had come back from the war in such a strange state that he hadn’t minded about everywhere falling into rack and ruin. According to my father, Lloyd’s Bank owned Challacombe Manor itself and had granted Mrs Ashburton permission to live there in her lifetime. It wouldn’t surprise him, my father said, if it turned out that Lloyd’s Bank owned Mrs Ashburton as well. ‘He drank himself to death,’ people used to say about Mr Ashburton. ‘She watched him and didn’t have the heart to stop him.’ Yet before the First World War Mr Ashburton had been a different kind of man, energetic and sharp. The Challacombe estate had been a showpiece.

To me in particular Mrs Ashburton talked about her husband. She was lucky that he’d come back from the war, even if he hadn’t been able to manage very well. His mind had been affected, she explained, but that was better than being dead. She told me about the men who’d died, gardeners at Challacombe Manor, and farm workers on the estate, and men she and her husband had known in the town. ‘I thanked God,’ Mrs Ashburton said, ‘when he came safely back here all in one piece. Everything fell to bits around us, but it didn’t matter because at least he was still alive. You understand, Matilda?’

I always nodded, although I didn’t really understand. And then she’d go on about the estate as it had been, and then about her husband and the conversations they used to have. Sometimes she didn’t address me directly. She smiled and just talked, always returning to the men who had been killed and how lucky she was that her husband had at least come back. She’d prayed, she said, that he’d come back, and every time another man from the estate or from the neighbourhood had been reported dead she’d felt that there was a better chance that her husband wouldn’t die also. ‘By the law of averages,’ she explained, ‘some had to come back. Some men have always come back from wars, you convince yourself.’

At this point I would always nod again, and Mrs Ashburton would say that looking back on it now she felt ashamed that she had ever applied the law of averages to the survival or death of men. Doing so was as horrible as war itself: the women who were left at home became cruel in their fear and their selfishness. Cruelty was natural in war, Mrs Ashburton said.

At the time she’d hated the Germans and she was ashamed of that too, because the Germans were just people like other people. But when she talked about them the remains of the hatred were still in her voice, and I imagined the Germans from what she told me about them: people who ate black bread and didn’t laugh much, who ate raw bacon, who were dour, grey and steely. She described the helmets they wore in wartime. She told me what a bayonet was, and I used to feel sick when I thought of one going into a man’s stomach and being twisted in there to make sure the man would die. She told me about poison gas, and the trenches, and soldiers being buried alive. The way she spoke I knew she was repeating, word for word, the things her husband had told her, things that had maybe been the cause of his affected mind. Even her voice sounded unusual when she talked about the war, as though she was trying to imitate her husband’s voice, and the terror that had been in it. He used to cry, she said, as he walked about the gardens, unable to stop the tears once they’d begun.

Dick didn’t say anything while we rode the two miles over to Challacombe Manor that Saturday. He didn’t even say anything when he suddenly dismounted and leaned his bicycle against a black gate, and climbed over the gate to have a smoke behind the hedge. If my father had come by he’d have known what was happening because he would have seen Betty and myself waiting in the lane, surrounded by the cloud of smoke that Dick always managed to make with his Woodbine. Our job was to warn him if we saw my father coming, but my father didn’t come that afternoon and when Dick had finished we continued on our way.

We’d often been to tea at Challacombe Manor before. Mrs Ashburton said we were the only visitors she had because most of her friends were dead, which was something that happened, she explained, if you were eighty-one. We always had tea in the kitchen, a huge room that smelt of oil, with armchairs in it and a wireless, and an oil-stove on which Mrs Ashburton cooked, not wishing to have to keep the range going. There were oatcakes for tea, and buttered white and brown bread, and pots of jam that Mrs Ashburton bought in the town, and a cake she bought also, usually a fruitcake. Afterwards we’d walk through the house with her, while she pointed out the places where the roof had given way, and the dry rot, and windows that were broken. She hadn’t lived in most of the house since the war, and had lived in even less of it since her husband had died in 1929. We knew these details by heart because she’d told us so many times. In one of the outhouses there was an old motor-car with flattyres, and the gardens were now all overgrown with grass and weeds. Rhododendrons were choked, and buddleia and kerria and hydrangeas.

The house was grey and square with two small wings, a stone Georgian house with wide stone steps leading to a front door that had pillars on either side of it and a fanlight above it. The gravel expanse in front of it was grassy now, and slippery in wet weather because of moss that had accumulated. French windows opened on to it on either side of the hall door, from the rooms that had been the drawing-room and the dining-room. Lawns stretched around the house, with grass like a meadow on them now. The tennis court, which we’d never known about until Mrs Ashburton mentioned it, was hidden away, beyond the jungle of shrubbery.

‘You see?’ she said. ‘You see, Dick?’ She was wearing a long, old-fashioned dress and a wide-brimmed white hat, and sunglasses because the afternoon was fiercely bright.

The grass on the tennis court was a yard high, as high as the rusty iron posts that were there to support the net. ‘Look,’ Mrs Ashburton said.

She led us to the stable-yard, past the outhouse where the motor-car was, and into a smaller outhouse. There was a lawn-mower there, as rusty as the tennis posts, and a marker in the same condition, and an iron roller. Tucked into the beams above our heads was a rolled-up tennis net. ‘He adored tennis,’ she said. He really loved it.’

She turned and we followed her across the stable-yard, into the kitchen by the back door. She talked about her husband while she made tea.

We ate the bought fruitcake, listening to her. We’d heard it all before, but we always considered it was worth it because of the cake and the biscuits and the buttered bread and the pots of jam. And always before we left she gave us ginger beer and pieces of chocolate broken upon a saucer. She told us about the child which might have been born to her husband and herself, six months after the old queen died, but which had miscarried. ‘Everything went wrong,’ she said. She told us about the parties there’d been at Challacombe Manor. Champagne and strawberries and cream, and parties with games that she described, and fancy dress.

‘No reason at all,’ she said, ‘why we shouldn’t have a tennis party.’

Dick made a sighing sound, a soft, slight noise that Mrs Ashburton didn’t hear.

‘Tennis party?’ Betty murmured.

‘No reason, dear.’

That morning Dick and Betty had had an argument. Betty had said that of course he must go to tea with Mrs Ashburton, since he’d always gone in the past. And Dick had said that Mrs Ashburton had been cunning: all these years, he said, she’d been inviting us to tea so that when the time was ripe she could get us to clean up her old tennis court. ‘Oh, don’t be silly!’ Betty had cried, and then had said that it would be the cruellest thing that Dick had ever done if he didn’t go to tea with an old woman just because she’d mentioned her tennis court. I’d been cross with Dick myself, and none of us felt very happy because the matter of the tennis court had unattractively brought into the open the motive behind our putting up with Mrs Ashburton. I didn’t like it when she called me her Matilda and put her arms around me, and said she was sure her child would have been a little girl, and that she was almost as sure that she’d have called her Matilda. I didn’t like it when she went on and on about the war and her husband coming back a wreck, or about the champagne and the strawberries and cream. ‘Poor Mrs Ashburton!’ we’d always said, but it wasn’t because she was poor Mrs Ashburton that we’d filled the emptiness of Saturday afternoons by cycling over to Challacombe Manor.

‘Shall we go and have another look at it?’ she said when we’d eaten all the food that was on the table. She smiled in her frail, almost beautiful way, and for a moment I wondered if Dick wasn’t perhaps right about her cunning. She led the way back to the overgrown tennis court and we all four stood looking at it.

‘It’s quite all right to smoke, Dick,’ Mrs Ashburton said, ‘if you want to.’

Dick laughed because he didn’t know how else to react. He’d gone as red as a sunset. He kicked at the rusty iron tennis post, and then as casually as he could he took a packet of squashed Woodbines from his pocket and began to fiddle with a box of matches. Betty poked him with her elbow, suggesting that he should offer Mrs Ashburton a cigarette.

‘Would you like one, Mrs Ashburton?’ Dick said, proffering the squashed packet.

‘Well, you know, I think I would, Dick.’ She laughed and took the cigarette, saying she hadn’t smoked a cigarette since 1915. Dick lit it for her. Some of the matches fell from the matchbox on to the long grass. He picked them up and replaced them, his own cigarette cocked out of the corner of his mouth. They looked rather funny, the two of them, Mrs Ashburton in her big white hat and sunglasses.

‘You’d need a scythe,’ Dick said.

That was the beginning of the tennis party. When Dick walked over the next Saturday with a scythe, Mrs Ashburton had a packet of twenty Player’s waiting for him. He scythed the grass and got the old hand-mower going. The stubble was coarse and by the time he’d cut it short there were quite large patches of naked earth, but Betty and Mrs Ashburton said they didn’t matter. The court would do as it was for this summer, but in the spring, Dick said, he’d put down fresh grass-seed. It rained heavily a fortnight later, which was fortunate, because Dick was able to even out some of the bumps with the roller. Betty helped him, and later on she helped him mark the court out. Mrs Ashburton and I watched, Mrs Ashburton holding my hand and often seeming to imagine that I was the child which hadn’t been born to her.

We took to going to Challacombe Manor on Sunday mornings as well as Saturdays. There were always packets of Craven A, and ginger beer and pieces of chocolate. ‘Of course, it’s not her property,’ my father said whenever anyone mentioned the tennis court, or the net that Mrs Ashburton had found rolled up in an outhouse. At dinnertime on Sundays, when we all sat around the long table in the kitchen, my father would ask Dick how he’d got on with the court. He’d then point out that the tennis court and everything that went with it was the property of Lloyd’s Bank. Every Sunday dinnertime we had the same: roast beef and roast potatoes and Yorkshire pudding, and carrots or brussels sprouts according to the seasonal variation, and apple pie and cream.

Dick didn’t ever say much when my father asked him about the tennis court. ‘You want to be careful, lad,’ my father used to say, squashing roast potatoes into gravy. ‘Lloyd’s is strict, you know.’ My father would go on for ages, talking about Lloyd’s Bank or the Aga cooker my mother wanted, and you never quite knew whether he was being serious or not. He would sit there with his jacket on the back of his chair, not smiling as he ate and talked. Farmers were like that, my mother once told Betty when Betty was upset by him. Farmers were cautious and watchful and canny. He didn’t at all disapprove of what Betty and Dick and Mrs Ashburton were doing with the tennis court, my mother explained, rather the opposite; but he was right when he reminded them that everything, including the house itself, was the property of Lloyd’s Bank.

Mrs Ashburton found six tennis racquets in presses, which were doubtless the property of Lloyd’s Bank also. Dick examined them and said they weren’t too bad. They had an antiquated look, and the varnish had worn off the frames, but only two of them had broken strings. Even those two, so Dick said, could be played with. He and Mrs Ashburton handed the racquets to one another, blowing at the dust that had accumulated on the presses and the strings. They lit up their cigarettes, and Mrs Ashburton insisted on giving Dick ten shillings to buy tennis balls with.

I sat with Mrs Ashburton watching Dick and Betty playing their first game on the court. The balls bounced in a peculiar way because in spite of all the rolling there were still hollows and bumps on the surface. The grass wasn’t green. It was a brownish yellow, except for the bare patches, which were ochre-coloured. Mrs Ashburton clapped every time there was a rally, and when Dick had beaten Betty 6–1, 6–4, he taught me how to hit the ball over the net, and how to volley it and keep it going. ‘Marvellous, Matilda!’ Mrs Ashburton cried, in her throaty voice, applauding again. ‘Marvellous!’

We played all that summer, every Saturday and Sunday until the end of term, and almost every evening when the holidays came. We had to play in the evenings because at the end of term Dick began to work on the farm. ‘Smoke your cigarettes if you want to,’ my father said the first morning of the holidays, at breakfast. ‘No point in hiding it, boy.’ Friends of Dick’s and Betty’s used to come to Challacombe Manor to play also, because that was what Mrs Ashburton wanted: Colin Gregg and Barbara Hosell and Peggy Goss and Simon Turner and Willie Beach.

Sometimes friends of mine came, and I’d show them how to do it, standing close to the net, holding the racquet handle in the middle of the shaft. Thursday, August 31st, was the day Mrs Ashburton set for the tennis party: Thursday because it was half-day in the town.

Looking back on it now, it really does seem that for years and years she’d been working towards her tennis party. She’d hung about the lanes in her governess cart waiting for us because we were the children from the farm, the nearest children to Challacombe Manor. And when Dick looked big and strong enough and Betty of an age to be interested, she’d made her bid, easing matters along with fruitcake and cigarettes. I can imagine her now, on her own in that ruin of a house, watching the grass grow on her tennis court and watching Dick and Betty growing up and dreaming of one more tennis party at Challacombe, a party like there used to be before her husband was affected in the head by the Kaiser’s war.

‘August the 31st,’ Betty reminded my parents one Sunday at dinnertime. ‘You’ll both come,’ she said fiercely, blushing when they laughed at her.

‘I hear Lloyd’s is on the rampage,’ my father said laboriously. ‘Short of funds. Calling everything in.’

Dick and Betty didn’t say anything. They ate their roast beef, pretending to concentrate on it.

‘’Course they’re not,’ my mother said.

‘They’ll sell Challacombe to some building fellow, now that it’s all improved with tennis courts.’

‘Daddy, don’t be silly,’ Betty said, blushing even more. All three of us used to blush. We got it from my mother. If my father blushed you wouldn’t notice.

‘True as I’m sitting here, my dear. Nothing like tennis courts for adding a bit of style to a place.’

Neither my mother nor my father had ever seen the tennis court. My father wouldn’t have considered it the thing, to go walking over to Challacombe Manor to examine a tennis court. My mother was always busy, cooking and polishing brass. Neither my father nor my mother knew the rules of tennis. When we first began to play Betty used to draw a tennis court on a piece of paper and explain.

‘Of course we’ll come to the tennis party,’ my mother said quietly. ‘Of course, Betty.’

In the middle of the tennis party, my father persisted, a man in a hard black hat from Lloyd’s Bank would walk on to the court and tell everyone to go home.

‘Oh, Giles, don’t be silly now,’ my mother said quite sharply, and added that there was such a thing as going on too much. My father laughed and winked at her.

Mrs Ashburton asked everyone she could think of to the tennis party, people from the farms round about and shopkeepers from the town. Dick and Betty asked their friends and their friends’ parents, and I asked Belle Frye and the Gorrys and the Seatons. My mother and Betty made meringues and brandy-snaps and fruitcakes and Victoria sponge cakes and scones and buns and shortbread. They made sardine sandwiches and tomato sandwiches and egg sandwiches and ham sandwiches. I buttered the bread and whipped up cream and wrapped the plates of sandwiches in damp tea-cloths. Dick cleared a place in the shrubbery beside the tennis court and built a fire to boil kettles on. Milk was poured into bottles and left to keep cool in the larder. August 31st was a fine, hot day.

At dinnertime my father pretended that the truck which was to convey the food, and us too, to the tennis court had a broken carburettor. He and Joe had been working on it all morning, he said, but utterly without success. No one took any notice of him.

I remember, most of all, what they looked like. Mrs Ashburton thin as a rake in a long white dress and her wide-brimmed white hat and her sunglasses. My father in his Sunday clothes, a dark blue suit, his hair combed and his leathery brown face shining because he had shaved it and washed it specially. My mother had powder on her cheeks and her nose, and a touch of lipstick on her lips, although she didn’t usually wear lipstick and must have borrowed Betty’s. She was wearing a pale blue dress speckled with tiny white flowers. She’d spent a fortnight making it herself, for the occasion. Her reddish hair was soft and a little unruly, being freshly washed. My father was awkward in his Sunday suit, as he always was in it. His freckled hands lolled uneasily by his sides, or awkwardly held tea things, cup and saucer and plate. My mother blushed beneath her powder, and sometimes stammered, which she did when she was nervous.

Betty was beautiful that afternoon, in a white tennis dress that my mother had made her. Dick wore long white flannels that he’d been given by old Mr Bowe, a solicitor in the town who’d been to other tennis parties at Challacombe Manor but had no further use for white flannel trousers, being seventy-two now and too large for the trousers he’d kept for more than fifty years. My mother had made me a tennis dress, too, but I felt shy that day and didn’t want to do anything except hand round plates of meringues and cake. I certainly didn’t want to play, for the tennis was serious: mixed doubles, Betty and Colin Gregg against Dick and Peggy Goss, and Simon Turner and Edie Turner against Barbara Hosell and Willie Beach.

People were there whom my father said he hadn’t seen for years, people who had no intention of playing tennis, any more than he had. Between them, Dick and Betty and Mrs Ashburton had cast a wide net, and my father’s protests at the mounds of food that had been prepared met with their answer as car after car drew up, and dog-carts and pony and traps. Belle Frye and I passed around the plates of meringues, and people broke off in their conversations to ask us who we were. Mrs Ashburton had spread rugs on the grass around the court, and four white ornamental seats had been repainted by Dick the week before. ‘Just like the old days,’ a man called Mr Race said, a corn merchant from the town. My mother nervously fidgeted, and I could feel her thinking that perhaps my father’s laborious joke would come true, that any moment now the man from Lloyd’s Bank would arrive and ask people what on earth they thought they were doing, playing tennis without the Bank’s permission.

But that didn’t happen. The balls zipped to and fro across the net, pinging off the strings, throwing up dust towards the end of the afternoon. Voices called out in exasperation at missed shots, laughter came and went. The sun continued to shine warmly, the tennis players wiped their foreheads with increasing regularity, the rugs on the grass were in the shade. Belle Frye and I collected the balls and threw them back to the servers. Mr Bowe said that Dick had the makings of a fine player.

Mrs Ashburton walked among the guests with a packet of Player’s in her hand, talking to everyone. She kept going up to my mother and thanking her for everything she’d done. Whenever she saw me she kissed me on the hair. Mr Race said she shook hands like a duchess. The rector, Mr Throataway, laughed jollily.

At six o’clock, just as people were thinking of going, my father surprised everyone by announcing that he had a barrel of beer and a barrel of cider in the truck. I went with him and there they were, two barrels keeping cool beneath a tarpaulin, and two wooden butter-boxes full of glasses that he’d borrowed from the Heart of Oak. He drove the truck out from beneath the shade of the trees and backed it close to the tennis court. He and Dick set the barrels up and other men handed round the beer and cider, whichever anyone wanted. ‘Just like him,’ I heard a woman called Mrs Garland saying. ‘Now, that’s just like him.’

It was a quarter to ten that evening before they stopped playing tennis. You could hardly see the ball as it swayed about from racquet to racquet, looping over the net, driven out of court. My father and Mr Race went on drinking beer, and Joe and Arthur, who’d arrived after milking, stood some distance away from them, drinking beer also. Mrs Garland and my mother and Miss Sweet and Mrs Tissard made more tea, and the remains of the sandwiches and cakes were passed around by Belle Frye and myself. Joe said he reckoned it was the greatest day in Mrs Ashburton’s life. ‘Don’t go drinking that cider now,’ Joe said to Belle Frye and myself.

We all sat around in the end, smacking at midges and finishing the sandwiches and cakes. Betty and Colin Gregg had cider, and you could see from the way Colin Gregg kept looking at Betty that he was in love with her. He was holding her left hand as they sat there, thinking that no one could see because of the gloom, but Belle Frye and I saw, all right. Just before we went home, Belle Frye and I were playing at being ghosts round at the front of the house and we came across Betty and Colin Gregg kissing behind a rhododendron bush. They were lying on the grass with their arms tightly encircling one another, kissing and kissing as though they were never going to stop. They didn’t even know Belle Frye and I were there. ‘Oh, Colin!’ Betty kept saying. ‘Oh, Colin, Colin!’

We wanted to say goodbye to Mrs Ashburton, but we couldn’t find her. We ran around looking everywhere, and then Belle Frye suggested that she was probably in the house.

‘Mrs Ashburton!’ I called, opening the door that led from the stable-yard to the kitchen. ‘Mrs Ashburton!’

It was darker in the kitchen than it was outside, almost pitch-dark because the windows were so dirty that even in daytime it was gloomy.

‘Matilda,’ Mrs Ashburton said. She was sitting in an armchair by the oil-stove. I knew she was because that was where her voice came from. We couldn’t see her.

‘We came to say goodbye, Mrs Ashburton.’

She told us to wait. She had a saucer of chocolate for us, she said, and we heard her rooting about on the table beside her. We heard the glass being removed from a lamp and then she struck a match. She lit the wick and put the glass back. In the glow of lamplight she looked exhausted. Her eyes seemed to have receded, the thinness of her face was almost sinister.

We ate our chocolate in the kitchen that smelt of oil, and Mrs Ashburton didn’t speak. We said goodbye again, but she didn’t say anything. She didn’t even nod or shake her head. She didn’t kiss me like she usually did, so I went and kissed her instead. The skin of her face felt like crinkled paper.

‘I’ve had a very happy day,’ she said when Belle Frye and I had reached the kitchen door. ‘I’ve had a lovely day,’ she said, not seeming to be talking to us but to herself. She was crying, and she smiled in the lamplight, looking straight ahead of her. ‘It’s all over,’ she said. ‘Yet again.’

We didn’t know what she was talking about and presumed she meant the tennis party. ‘Yet again,’ Belle Frye repeated as we crossed the stable-yard. She spoke in a soppy voice because she was given to soppiness. ‘Poor Mrs Ashburton!’ she said, beginning to cry herself, or pretending to. ‘Imagine being eighty-one,’ she said. ‘Imagine sitting in a kitchen and remembering all the other tennis parties, knowing you’d have to die soon. Race you,’ Belle Frye said, forgetting to be soppy any more.

Going home, Joe and Arthur sat in the back of the truck with Dick and Betty. Colin Gregg had ridden off on his bicycle, and Mr Bowe had driven away with Mrs Tissard beside him and Mr Tissard and Miss Sweet in the dickey of his Morris Cowley. My mother, my father and myself were all squashed into the front of the truck, and there was so little room that my father couldn’t change gear and had to drive all the way to the farm in first. In the back of the truck Joe and Arthur and Dick were singing, but Betty wasn’t, and I could imagine Betty just sitting there, staring, thinking about Colin Gregg. In Betty’s bedroom there were photographs of Clark Gable and Ronald Colman, and Claudette Colbert and the little Princesses. Betty was going to marry Colin, I kept saying to myself in the truck. There’d be other tennis parties and Betty would be older and would know her own mind, and Colin Gregg would ask her and she’d say yes. It was very beautiful, I thought, as the truck shuddered over the uneven back avenue of Challacombe Manor. It was as beautiful as the tennis party itself, the white dresses and Betty’s long hair, and everyone sitting and watching in the sunshine, and evening slowly descending. ‘Well, that’s the end of that,’ my father said, and he didn’t seem to be talking about the tennis party because his voice was too serious for that. He repeated a conversation he’d had with Mr Bowe and one he’d had with Mr Race, but I didn’t listen because his voice was so lugubrious, not at all like it had been at the tennis party. I was huddled on my mother’s knees, falling asleep. I imagined my father was talking about Lloyd’s Bank again, and I could hear my mother agreeing with him.

I woke up when my mother was taking off my dress in my bedroom.

‘What is it?’ I said. ‘Is it because the tennis party’s over? Why’s everyone so sad?’

My mother shook her head, but I kept asking her because she was looking sorrowful herself and I wasn’t sleepy any more. In the end she sat on the edge of my bed and said that people thought there was going to be another war against the Germans.

‘Germans?’ I said, thinking of the grey, steely people that Mrs Ashburton had so, often told me about, the people who ate black bread.

It would be all right, my mother said, trying to smile. She told me that we’d have to make special curtains for the windows so that the German aeroplanes wouldn’t see the lights at night. She told me there’d probably be sugar rationing.

I lay there listening to her, knowing now why Mrs Ashburton had said that yet again it was all over, and knowing what would happen next. I didn’t want to think about it, but I couldn’t help thinking about it: my father would go away, and Dick would go also, and Joe and Arthur and Betty’s Colin Gregg. I would continue to attend Miss Pritchard’s School and then I’d go on to the Grammar, and my father would be killed. A soldier would rush at my father with a bayonet and twist the bayonet in my father’s stomach, and Dick would do the same to another soldier, and Joe and Arthur would be missing in the trenches, and Colin Gregg would be shot.

My mother kissed me and told me to say my prayers before I went to sleep. She told me to pray for the peace to continue, as she intended to do herself. There was just a chance, she said, that it might.

She went away and I lay awake, beginning to hate the Germans and not feeling ashamed of it, like Mrs Ashburton was. No German would ever have played tennis that day, I thought; no German would have stood around having tea and sandwiches and meringues, smacking away the midges when night came. No German would ever have tried to recapture the past, or would have helped an old woman to do so, like my mother and my father had done, and Mr Race and Mr Bowe and Mr Throataway and Mrs Garland, and Betty and Dick and Colin Gregg. The Germans weren’t like that. The Germans wouldn’t see the joke when my father said that for all he knew Lloyd’s Bank owned Mrs Ashburton.

I didn’t pray for the peace to continue, but prayed instead that my father and Dick might come back when the war was over. I didn’t pray that Joe and Arthur and Colin Gregg should come back since that would be asking too much, because some men had to be killed, according to Mrs Ashburton’s law of averages. I hadn’t understood her when Mrs Ashburton had said that cruelty was natural in wartime, but I understood now. I understood her law of averages and her sitting alone in her dark kitchen, crying over the past. I cried myself, thinking of the grass growing on her tennis court, and the cruelty that was natural.