The Willow Pool

‘Nutty as a fruitcake!’ Meg had sucked in a deep breath then forced her lips into a smile. ‘Cheer up, queen! There’ll be two letters tomorrow! There might even be a phone call tonight!’

‘Yes. And even if there isn’t, at least I’m young and fit and not in pain like Gran.’

‘Or daft as a brush like Nanny Boag. Now let’s get our tea. Then I think I’ll give the outside steps a good scrub!’

Stone steps leading to the thick, nail-studded door, worn into hollows by generations of Kenworthy feet. Safe and enduring, those steps, and four hundred years old.

Now, as she drank her tea, Meg wondered how many times Dolly Blundell had scrubbed them. It was a sobering thought.

Five

The first few days in June, Meg was to consider as the end of her fortnight’s probabion drew close, had been interesting, especially with regard to Nanny Boag. Indeed, the more she thought about it, the more sure Meg became that her uneasiness seemed justified.

Take Sunday, for instance. Meg had insisted that collection of the Sunday papers would henceforth be her responsibility.

‘Fair’s fair, Polly. After all, you collect the milk.’

Daily papers were delivered as an act of kindness by Mrs Potter, together with the letters. Sunday papers, however, were left for collection in an outhouse at the back of the post office because, like anyone else, the postmistress needed a day off.

‘Will I take the papers upstairs, Mrs John?’ Meg asked on her return.

‘Later, perhaps. Think I’ll take a quick look at them myself first. After all, it is Sunday,’ she added almost apologetically.

‘OK by me.’ Polly Kenworthy hardly ever read newspapers; did not want to know that the war was not going as well for the Allies as it might. Nor did she want to see the obituary columns and lists of the names of men who were missing or believed killed in action. True, Davie wasn’t in action, but every one of those men who would never come home could have been the soldier she loved, and it hurt her to think that some other unknown woman had received one of the dreaded telegrams. Regretting.

‘Want porridge, Meg, or just an egg?’

Meg had been about to opt for an egg, when, ‘Oh, no! Would you believe it?’ Mary Kenworthy gasped. ‘I mean, it’s bad enough doing a thing like that, but to announce it on a Sunday when all the shops are shut so no one can buy in a few things is just – well – sneaky! Coupons for clothes! It just won’t work!’

‘Let me see!’ Polly shook open the second paper. It consisted of only four pages, so news of the rationing of clothes and footwear was not hard to find.

‘Well! If that isn’t just the last straw! No more luxury goods to be made and everything else to be manufactured under the utility mark. Shoddy, I shouldn’t wonder. And fourteen coupons must be given up for a winter coat, it says, and five for a pair of shoes! What on earth are They thinking about? How can anyone last for a year on sixty-six clothing coupons.’

‘If we’re to have utility clothes they’re bound to be cheap,’ Meg hesitated. ‘At least more people will be able to afford them – poor people, I mean …’

‘But no more luxury goods nor even wedding dresses!’ Polly pouted. ‘And I did so want a long white dress for my wedding! By the time Davie and me get around to it, though, they’ll be a thing of the past!’

‘Then why don’t you go to the shops tomorrow, good and early?’ Meg soothed. ‘Grab one while you can.’

‘But how, when I don’t have any clothing coupons? They haven’t given them out yet, and it doesn’t say when they will!’

Her eyes filled with tears, and she blew her nose noisily.

‘Hush, Polly. It isn’t the end of the world!’ There was a hint of admonition in Mary Kenworthy’s voice. ‘If you read what it says, you can give up your margarine coupons instead – till the proper ones are issued.’

‘But how can anyone do that? We need the margarine to eat! What a stupid idea!’

‘So how about waiting like we’ll all have to do? Then the minute you get your hands on the coupons you can nip off to town and hunt down a wedding dress – though how many coupons you’ll have to give up to get one, heaven only knows! There’s a lot of material in a wedding dress,’ Meg cautioned. ‘It seems that a dress is going to take seven coupons, but I don’t think it applies to long wedding dresses.’

‘I think what Meg says makes sense.’ Mary Kenworthy stared pointedly over the top of her reading glasses. ‘And if the worst comes to the worst, do you have to have a white dress?’

‘But every bride has one! It wouldn’t be like a wedding without one!’

‘Then it would seem to me, Polly, that you are more in love with the idea of walking down the aisle in white than you are with Davie!’

‘Mummy!’

With a scraping of chair legs Polly flung from the table, to run sobbing across the courtyard.

‘I’d better go –’

‘No, Meg. Leave her. If she loves Davie as much as I’m sure she does, then she’ll see how unimportant it is. Come to think of it, there’ll be a lot of shattered dreams, this morning …’

Polly returned ten minutes later, tears still wet on her cheeks, her expression contrite.

‘I’m sorry – I truly am. Forgive me? I acted like a spoiled brat. As if it matters what I wear! When I thought about it, I realized that if Davie turned up tomorrow on a week’s embarkation leave, I’d marry him in my best cotton frock and Sunday hat!’

‘You’d marry him, girl, in an old sack with a pan on yer ’ead,’ Meg grinned.

‘Yes, I would. It isn’t what you wear at a wedding, but how you say the words.’

‘And never forget, darling girl, that I know what it is like to have the man you love away at war. So don’t worry, you will wear white when you marry Davie – how ever many clothing coupons it takes. I promise.’

‘That’s settled, then,’ Meg beamed. ‘And we’d better listen to all the news broadcasts so we won’t miss bein’ told how we get the dratted coupons. And when we do, you can be off to the shops for a weddin’ dress – if they haven’t all disappeared under the counter, that is! An’ you must go with her, Mrs John. I’m not taking no for an answer. No excuses. I’m here now, and a day out at the shops will do you both good – even if there won’t be a lot to buy. Now what do you say to that, eh?’

‘I’d say,’ Polly smiled, tears gone, ‘that if I’d been lucky enough to have a sister – well, I wish she’d have been exactly like you!’

Indeed, it had been the matter of the unfairness of clothes rationing that gave strength to Meg’s suspicions about the true state of Nanny Boag’s mind the next day.

‘Awful, isn’t it, Nanny, and Polly so wantin’ a white dress and white shoes and some pretty nighties and things for when she gets married?’

‘That, I suggest, is Polly’s worry and not yours! For my own part, I have worked it out that I can manage quite well for the rest of my days on what is in my wardrobe and drawers. I don’t go out, so I won’t need new shoes nor a winter coat – that’s nineteen coupons saved already,’ she smiled smugly. ‘And I have enough knitting wool put by for the odd cardigan and slippers. Oh no, clothes rationing won’t worry me at all!’

‘Then you can give them nineteen coupons to Polly! If she can’t get a proper weddin’ dress she’ll have to have one made for her. At two coupons for a yard of white satin, that would be nine and a half yards – more than enough!’

‘Them nineteen coupons? Don’t you mean those nineteen coupons? You speak so badly, child. And if you have come to play with Polly, then she’ll be at church with the family, so I suggest you collect your nanny from the kitchen and go back to where you came from!’

‘Polly isn’t at church. You know they went yesterday – Sunday.’

‘Don’t argue! What Nanny says in the nursery is never to be contradicted. Now be off with you, little girl!’

Strewth! At it again! Meg closed the door behind her. When something didn’t please her, that one could change from sane to silly at the drop of a hat!

And wasn’t that it? Nanny had read about clothing coupons in the paper; was even able to calculate how many she would be saving. Yet the moment it was suggested she give some to Polly, the daft look had come back on her face and she was in another world again.

Yet the truth was as plain as the nose on your face, Meg thought triumphantly as everything clicked into place. Nanny Boag was as sane as most folk, given her age, and it was only when something didn’t suit her did she start her gaga act! She didn’t need her coupons, but no one else was getting their hands on them, so pull down the shutters and act stupid!

‘Gotcher, you crafty old biddy!’ Meg gloated. That one was as normal and nimble as need be, all things considered, but she’d got the Kenworthys fooled! From now on, though, she would have her work cut out pulling the wool over Margaret Mary Blundell’s eyes!

Though something Nanny had said was right, Meg sighed. No denying it: she didn’t speak properly! She got her thems and thoses wrong, and dropped aitches and spoke with a thick Liverpool accent – which was all right for Liverpool where most people she knew spoke the same and understood each other perfectly well, but it wasn’t right for Candlefold. She must ask Polly to help her. It was the only way she would ever learn to talk proper like Ma!

The second incident to give strength to Meg’s suspicions was two days later when the death of Kaiser Wilhelm II was reported, taking only four lines in the daily paper, which was all he deserved, come to think of it. She had been on her way to collect Mrs Kenworthy’s breakfast tray when dreadful wailing came to her from the floor above.

‘Oh, my goodness!’ Meg had taken the narrow nursery stairs two at a time to stop, breathless, outside the open door.

‘And thank God you are dead, you pig! It was you caused my John to be wounded! If you hadn’t started that war he’d be alive today! You should have died in those filthy trenches and not lived another twenty years! But I hope you died in pain, you evil bastard, and I wish I’d been there to see it! I’d have stood and cheered!’

‘Nanny! What’s to do?’ Meg pushed the door wider. ‘You’ll do yourself an upset, carryin’ on like that!’

‘Like what?’ The old women turned, eyes wide, lips relaxed in a smile, looking so cherubic that it was hardly possible to believe the venom in her words, nor the swearing either.

‘The Kaiser, I mean. Him bein’ dead.’

‘Dead, is he? Well, fancy that, now. I once heard it said he had a funny left arm – withered, you know. Must have been a great trial to him!’

‘It must have.’ Yet that same Kaiser with whom Nanny now sympathized had, only seconds ago, been loudly cursed by that apple-cheeked, smiling old lady! ‘Is there anything I can get you, Nanny?’ she said quietly.

‘No, thank you. Pop off and play. I’ll ring for one of the maids if I want anything.’

She had beamed again, the two-faced old cat, Meg fumed; changed from her cursing and swearing to a soft-voiced, gentle old woman and all because she had realized she might have been heard!

My, but she was going to take some watching, though how she was going to convince Mrs John and Polly about Nanny’s deceiving ways Meg sighed, was altogether another matter!

Meg had brushed the worn stone floor of the entrance hall and was dusting the panelling when Mary Kenworthy said, ‘Do you wonder as I do, Meg, how many people have dusted and polished and touched those panels?’

‘Thousands, I reckon. I like touching them. Silly, isn’t it, liking the feel of wood under your fingertips …’

‘Not at all. I feel the same way myself. And be sure that the long-ago woodcarver would be pleased to hear you say it.’

‘How long ago?’

‘About five hundred years, I would say. It was the third Kenworthy who had this hall panelled – to proclaim his growing wealth, I suppose. When the Lancastrians ruled England, it would be. Y’know,’ she smiled, ‘hand-me-down talk has it that Richard Kenworthy – he was known as Dickon – wanted his great hall embellished with linenfold carving, but the artisan who did it didn’t please Master Dickon. It’s said that he told the woodcarver it looked more like drips of tallow down the side of a candle and that he would be the laughing stock of the Riding, with such a shoddy job! Whereupon the crafty carver told him that he would be the envy of all, being the first gentleman to benefit from the new candlefold panelling. And Dickon believed him, and paid him well for his pains. I think that is how the house got its name.’

‘You’re lucky, Mrs John – bein’ able to tell family jokes about all them – those – years ago. Don’t you feel proud – special, sort of?’

‘I’m not a Kenworthy, Meg, though I married into it and helped carry on the line and the Kenworthy pride too. And Polly – who is adopted as you will know – is the most devout Kenworthy of us all!’

‘It must be something about this place,’ Meg said softly. ‘It takes you over.’

‘So you like being with us, Meg? Your two weeks are almost up. Are you going to stay?’

‘Are you askin’?’ Meg smiled.

‘I most certainly am!’

‘Then if it’s all right with you, Mrs John, I’m stoppin’.’ She held out her hand. ‘And I hope I give satisfaction, I’m sure.’

‘I know you will. I’ve got used to having you around. But you haven’t taken the time off due to you. Why don’t you go home for a couple of days? There must be things you need to see to?’

‘We-e-ll, I’ll have to get my new address put on my ration book and identity card. And there’s the house, an’ all. I’ll have to ask next door to keep an eye on it; send on any letters that come.’

Letters. From Kip. They might be there, waiting for her. Yet she had hardly thought about him, so charmed had she been with her new life! Nor had she sent him so much as a picture postcard of Nether Barton, which, despite the shortage of such things, could still be bought at the pre-war price of tuppence at the post office.

‘Then shall we say you are on a forty-eight-hour pass, as Mark would call it. Will that suit, Meg?’

‘It’ll suit very nicely indeed.’

A pound a week, and all this? Oh my word yes, it would suit!

Meg stripped her bed of sheets and pillowcases, folding them neatly, ready to be taken to the wash house for Mrs Seed, who always came Thursdays. Before her marriage she had worked at Candlefold as a housemaid and now came each week to see to the laundry and, on Friday mornings, to do the ironing. It seemed to Meg that Mrs Seed was another who had come under the spell of this house, and still looked on it as a part of her way of life.

Mr Potter – you always called him Mister – was exactly the same, caring for the garden as if it were his own, he having arrived there as an apprentice thirty years ago and not inclined to go elsewhere, in spite of tempting offers. Ma had been the same, loyal to it in memory, a place never to be forgotten. And now her daughter was equally besotted. Even to think of visiting Tippet’s Yard did not please her as it should, for wasn’t Candleford to be her home now? But she was looking forward to seeing Nell and Tommy again; telling them about her new life and what it was really like living deep in the countryside. If she missed anything about Liverpool, she admitted, it was the two people who shared the shut-away little yard with her.

But first to catch the Preston bus. A good three hours it would take her with all the chopping and changing, and each mile taking her back to a place she would really rather not be. Yet Nell and Tommy deserved to be told about her good fortune, because up until now they had shared her troubles – them, and Kip.

Kip Lewis. She wished she could love him as Polly loved Davie, but she wanted to be really in love – which girl didn’t? – wanted to know the highs and lows of it and the needing and the giving. She would accept, even, the absolute misery when a letter did not arrive and the brief hours spent together to balance out weeks of separation. If she loved as Polly loved, that was. If it happened to her as suddenly and completely as it had happened to Polly, and her stomach went boing! as Polly’s had done, then she would be glad to be in love for ever.

And until it happened she must wait, because couldn’t she next month, next week, tomorrow even, turn a corner and see him there and know he was the one? She thought again of Kip, and sadness took her.

‘I’m sorry, Kip, that it can’t be you …’

At Preston station she was able to buy a return ticket to Liverpool, which meant that at least the trains were back on the lines. But Liverpool, when she arrived there, seemed still to be reeling from the vicious bombing. The stink of blitzkrieg still hung on the air, a dusty, musty smell mingling with the acrid odour of burned timber and the stench of escaped sewage.

Yet she saw no danger signs as the bus made towards Scotland Road; at least ruptured gas and water mains seemed to have been taken care of, and bombs that had lain there unexploded and dangerous. Gangs still shifted rubble, though, and shovelled and heaved the heart of what had once been a proud seaport onto the backs of lorries.

Where would they take all the debris? Would it be dumped in bomb craters or tipped into the Mersey? Did anyone give a damn? Meg thought dully, because inside her she had the grace to care; not because it was Liverpool and people’s homes and jobs and way of life, but because there were places, not so very far away, that knew nothing of destruction and death; places surrounded by fields and trees and flowers, and where old, old stones stood untouched by time or destruction, would go on for six hundred years more. Could she ever, during those terror-filled nights, have thought such peace existed? And wasn’t she the lucky one to have left the nightmare behind her?

She gazed fixedly at her hands because she did not want to look out on the destruction either side of her and because she felt guilty it was no longer her concern. She lived in the country now; must learn to forget Scotland Road and Lyra Street and Tippet’s Yard!

Yet despite her resolve, the feeling of unease was still with her when she walked beneath the low alleyway and stood to gaze into the airless little court, taking in the wash house, the lavatories and three little houses packed together as if clinging for support. Nor did the feeling leave her when her eyes lit on her neighbour, sitting on a wooden chair, arms folded, eyes closed, outside number 2.

‘Hi there, Nell!’

The head jerked up and, all at once wide-eyed, Nell Shaw straightened her shoulders and ran her tongue round her lips.

‘Well, if it isn’t Meg Blundell, come home from the wilds and the kettle not on! Come here, girl, and let’s be lookin’ at you. My, but you look as if you’ve been on yer ’olidays!’

Her cheeks had filled out and pinked, Nell thought; her eyes shone, her hair too. Real bonny, she looked. No, by the heck, two weeks in the country had turned her into a little beauty.

‘I have been – leastways, it seems like it. Compared to this place, it’s another world. You wouldn’t believe it!’

‘So come inside and try tellin’ me whilst I’m brewing up.’

‘These are for you.’ Meg laid the carefully carried sheaf of flowers on the kitchen table.

‘Lord help us, you shouldn’t have! What did they cost you, and how many vases do you think I’ve got, girl?’

‘They cost nuthink. I got them from the garden of the brick house. But you’ll never guess what I’ve got in me bag. Eggs! Fresh, an’ all. Two each for you and Tommy. Polly sent them and, oh, there’s so much to tell you, Nell!’

‘So first things first. Are you stoppin’?’

‘At Tippet’s? No. I’m going back on Saturday. Just came to see you both and sort out a few things, then I’m off back. Mrs John wants me to stop and I want to, Nell. ’Fraid I haven’t brought any food with me, but I’ll nip out and buy a loaf, and there’s jam in the cupboard. And tonight I’ll go to the chippy and treat us all to a fish supper.’

‘Then you’ll have to be in the queue good and early, girl – half an hour before they open. But let’s have your news, though I’m sorry you are off back there. Me an’ Tommy have missed you. Met a young man, have you?’

‘Heck, no! There’s only Mr Potter, who’s the gardener, and Mr Armitage at Home Farm, and they’re old. Polly is engaged, though – to Davie, who’s in the Service Corps – lorries and transports and things – and Polly’s brother is in the same regiment. And, would you believe it, Polly is adopted and it doesn’t bother her one bit! But I’ll tell you all about it right from the start, eh?’ She plopped a saccharin tablet into her cup and watched it rise fizzing to the top of her tea.

‘By the way, you didn’t stop your milk, so I took it. That all right, Meg? I paid for it.’

‘Then don’t cancel it. No need for the milkie to know I’m away. They’ve got their own cow at Candlefold, so they don’t need my milk coupons. You’re welcome to my ration, Nell. An’ I hope you took my coal, an’ all – get a bit stocked up for the winter.’

And Nell said of course she had, since Meg had told her to, then lit a cigarette, glad that Doll’s girl was back, if only for a little time.

‘Tell me, Meg, before you start, do they know who you are? Did you tell them you was born there?’

‘No, and I won’t till I’m good and ready, though the old lady remembered Ma. Said they’d once had a housemaid called Dorothy Blundell, but I told her it was a common enough name around Liverpool and she hasn’t mentioned it since. But let me tell you …’

And the words tumbled breathlessly out, about the old part of the house, and the newer brick part that They had taken over, though no one quite knew why. And how the garden had got overgrown so you wouldn’t recognize it from Ma’s photo, and how she had nipped through the hedge and gathered the flowers she had brought with her; told how Polly was a love and treated her like an equal; how they all did, except batty old Nanny who lived in another world, when it suited her. And about sunrises and sunsets and that it hadn’t rained one day since she had been there, and feeding hens and running up and down the stone stairs and Mrs John being grateful for another pair of hands to help out with the old ladies.

‘Polly works almost every day in the kitchen garden. They send vegetables an’ things to the local shops. And next time I come, there’ll be strawberries ripe, I shouldn’t wonder, and I’ll be able to bring you some. And there’ll be raspberries and plums and apples, and Mr Armitage told me that if I let him know next time I’m over, he’ll make sure I have a rabbit to bring with me.’

She talked on, eyes shining, about how right Ma had been about Candlefold, and how it was a place hidden from the war; a place where there was milk to spare and vegetables so fresh you wouldn’t believe it; talked on and on till Nell took a hand.

‘Written to Kip, have you, since you’ve been away?’ she interrupted, eyes narrowed.

‘Kip? Well – no, Nell. But I’ve been so busy there didn’t seem time. I’ve brought a postcard with me, though, of the village. I’ll send him that.’

‘There’s a letter with a New Zealand stamp on it behind your clock, and a parcel I put in the pantry. Arrived yesterday, so mind you write and thank him for it.’ She fixed Meg with a no-nonsense stare. ‘What kind of a way is that to treat your young man!’

‘He isn’t my young man, Nell; not my steady. We don’t have an understandin’. You know we don’t!’

‘Then more’s the pity. Kip Lewis is as good a lad as you’re likely to meet, and think on that I’ve told you so!’

‘I know he’s decent and I’m not leading him on, honest I’m not. I’m fond of him, though, and grateful for what he sends – and I’ll not need to go to the chippy now. I’ll open the parcel and we’ll all have a slap-up meal tonight!’

‘So is that all he means to you – the food he sends?’

‘I said I was fond of him, Nell, but I’m not rushing into anything. You said men are out for the main chance – I’m living proof of it, aren’t I? Have there been any more raids, by the way?’ Best talk of other things.