Life after life

20 January 1915

‘WILL YER GET a move on?’ Bridget said crossly. She was standing impatiently in the doorway, holding Teddy. ‘How many times do I have to tell you, yer tea is on the table.’ Teddy squirmed in the tight brace of her arms. Maurice paid no heed, deeply involved as he was in the intricacies of a Red Indian war dance. ‘Get down from that window, Ursula, for the love of God. And why is it open? It’s freezing, you’ll catch yer death.’

Ursula had been about to plunge out of the window in Queen Solange’s wake, intent on delivering her from the no man’s land of the roof, when something made her hesitate. A little doubt, a faltering foot and the thought that the roof was very high and the night very wide. And then Pamela had appeared and said, ‘Mummy says you’re to wash your hands for tea,’ closely followed by Bridget stomping up the stairs with her unyielding refrain, Yer tea’s on the table! and all hope of royal rescue was lost. ‘And as for you, Maurice,’ Bridget continued, ‘you’re little more than a savage.’

‘I am a savage,’ he said. ‘I’m an Apache.’

‘You could be the King of the Hottentots as far as I’m concerned but YER TEA IS STILL ON THE TABLE.’

Maurice gave a last defiant battle cry before clattering noisily down the stairs and Pamela used an old lacrosse-net tied on to a walking cane to trawl Queen Solange back from the icy depths of the roof.

Tea was a boiled chicken. Teddy had a coddled egg. Sylvie sighed. Many meals involved chickens in one way or another now that they kept their own. They had a henhouse and a wired run on what was to have been an asparagus bed before the war. Old Tom had left them now, although Sylvie heard that ‘Mr Ridgely’ still worked for their neighbours, the Coles. Perhaps, after all, he did not like being called ‘Old Tom’.

‘This isn’t one of our chickens, is it?’ Ursula asked.

‘No, darling,’ Sylvie said. ‘It isn’t.’

The chicken was tough and stringy. Mrs Glover’s cooking hadn’t been the same since George was injured in a gas attack. He was still in a field hospital in France and when Sylvie enquired how badly he was injured she said she didn’t know. ‘How awful,’ Sylvie said. Sylvie thought that if she had a wounded son, far from home, she would have to go on a quest to find him. Nurse and heal her poor boy. Perhaps not Maurice, but Teddy, certainly. The thought of Teddy lying wounded and helpless made her eyes prick with tears.

‘Are you all right, Mummy?’ Pamela asked.

‘Absolutely,’ Sylvie said, fishing the wishbone out of the chicken carcass and offering it to Ursula, who said she didn’t know how to wish. ‘Well, generally speaking, we wish for our dreams to come true,’ Sylvie said.

‘But not my dreams?’ Ursula said, a look of alarm on her face.

‘But not my dreams?’ Ursula said, thinking of the giant lawn-mower that chased her through the night and the Red Indian tribe that tied her to stakes and surrounded her with bows and arrows.

‘This is one of our chickens, isn’t it?’ Maurice said.

Ursula liked the chickens, liked the warm straw and featheriness of the henhouse, liked reaching under the solid warm bodies to find an even warmer egg.

‘It’s Henrietta, isn’t it?’ Maurice persisted. ‘She was old. Ready for the pot, Mrs Glover said.’

Ursula inspected her plate. She was particularly fond of Henrietta. The tough white slice of meat gave no clues.

‘Henrietta?’ Pamela squeaked in alarm.

‘Did you kill her?’ Maurice asked Sylvie eagerly. ‘Was it very bloody?’

They had already lost several chickens to the foxes. Sylvie said she was surprised at how stupid chickens were. No more stupid than people, Mrs Glover said. The foxes had taken Pamela’s baby rabbit too, last summer. George Glover had rescued two and Pamela had insisted on making a nest for hers out in the garden but Ursula had rebelled and brought her little rabbit inside and placed it in the dolls’ house where it knocked everything over and left droppings like tiny liquorice balls. When Bridget discovered it she removed it to an outhouse and it was never seen again.

For pudding they had jam roly-poly and custard, the jam from the summer’s raspberries. The summer was a dream now, Sylvie said.

‘Dead baby,’ Maurice said, in that horribly offhand manner that boarding school had only served to foster. He shovelled pudding into his mouth and said, ‘That’s what we call jam roly-poly at school.’

‘Manners, Maurice,’ Sylvie warned. ‘And please, don’t be so vile.’

‘Dead baby?’ Ursula said, putting her spoon down and gazing in horror at the dish in front of her.

‘The Germans eat them,’ Pamela said gloomily.

‘Puddings?’ Ursula puzzled. Didn’t everyone eat puddings, even the enemy?

‘No, babies,’ Pamela said. ‘But only Belgian ones.’

Sylvie looked at the roly-poly, the round, red seam of jam like blood, and shivered. This morning she had watched Mrs Glover snapping poor old Henrietta’s neck backwards over a broom handle, the bird dispatched with the indifference of a state executioner. Needs must, I suppose, Sylvie thought. ‘We’re at war,’ Mrs Glover said, ‘it’s not the time to be squeamish.’

Pamela would not let the subject rest. ‘Was it, Mummy?’ she insisted quietly. ‘Was it Henrietta?’

‘No, darling,’ Sylvie said. ‘On my word of honour, that was not Henrietta.’

An urgent rapping at the back door prevented further discussion. They all sat still, staring at each other, as if they had been caught in the middle of a crime. Ursula didn’t really know why. ‘Don’t let it be bad news,’ Sylvie said. It was. Seconds later there was a terrible scream from the kitchen. Sam Wellington, the old boot, was dead.

‘This terrible war,’ Sylvie murmured.

Pamela gave Ursula the remains of one of her dun-coloured balls of four-ply lambswool and Ursula promised that Queen Solange would be delivered of a little mat for Pamela’s water glass in gratitude for her rescue.

When they went to bed that night they placed the crinoline lady and Queen Solange side by side on the bedside cabinet, valiant survivors of an encounter with the enemy.