Great Meadow Read online

  If our parents were staying with us, when our father had his holiday from The Times, which wasn’t very long, he used to do it . . . but if we were just with Lally we had to. And it was pretty rotten, I can tell you.

  We always had to do it in the dark, which was terribly silly because there was no one for miles and miles who could have seen us. And anyway, who would want to watch somebody emptying their privy? But our parents said it had to be done at night, and so at night it was. Because it was correct, or something. And because it was dark it was doubly difficult on account of we had to have a hurricane lamp to see the way. It was jolly difficult to hold on to the big pole with one hand and the hurricane lamp with the other to see that you didn’t fall over the rhubarb or trip over the bean-sticks, because if you did it would have been pretty terrible, and I always had to lead. So we were extra careful.

  ‘While I’m drying up, after supper, you two nip off with the lamp and I’ll keep young Brian here by me: he can help me with the drying. Can’t have your Guest running about with the Night Soil, can we?’

  ‘Why ever not?’ said my sister, scraping her plate quite hard.

  ‘If you go on doing that very much longer, Madde-moselle, you’ll have the pattern off. Leave over, do! Such manners I’ve never seen.’

  ‘But why can’t he?’ said my sister. ‘He’s a boy and I’m a girl.’

  ‘Goodness me today!’ cried Lally. ‘Of course he can’t. He’s hardly been in the house a couple of minutes. It’s our business, not his.’

  My sister made a terrible choking noise and covered her face with her napkin. Lally went quite red in the face when I started to snort and pushed my hand over my mouth.

  ‘And pray what’s given us all the hysterics, may I ask?’ said Lally getting redder than ever. She did if she felt she had said something funny without knowing.

  ‘Business has,’ said my sister and almost fell off her chair. Lally gave her a terrific box on the ears and told us to mind our p’s and q’s and help her clear the table. But you could see she was a bit angry with herself for making us laugh and not really knowing why. That’s what made us laugh all the more, so she sent us out into the garden until we could behave ourselves.

  ‘I’ve got the hiccups,’ said my sister, ‘because of the Bindie Bucket . . . Anyway, one thing, she said No Baths tonight because of this Brian person. So that’s good.’

  ‘Unless we spill it,’ I said. ’Then we’d have to, wouldn’t we?’

  ‘Don’t say! It might happen. But it’s good about no bath, isn’t it.’

  Every Friday we had to have our baths. First of all we had to go wooding to get enough sticks and stuff to keep the copper really hot, and that used to start just after washing up lunch. Well, first of all, before the wooding even started, I had to get the water up from the pump. Buckets and buckets to fill the copper, and it was huge. So big that when the wooden lid was on we used to stand the two Primus stoves on the top, and the little paraffin oven where Lally did her cooking if we weren’t using the range. Which we didn’t much, in the summer. So you can see it was pretty hard to fill. There was a small firehole underneath, and that had to be filled with the wood all afternoon. So it was water in the top and wood in the bottom part.

  Then we had to get the big tin bath out of the lean-to, and dust it round, and stand it on a big piece of linoleum on the bricks in front of the copper fire. Then there was the clothes-horse standing there with towels around it for airing, and also to keep off any draughts, the big bar of pink Lifebuoy soap, and the old loofah: and then we could have our baths.

  First my sister, because she was the youngest, and when she was finished we topped it up with fresh hot water from the copper, because it was getting a bit cool by this time. I had mine while they went into the sitting-room and had cocoa and alphabet biscuits.

  So you can see it was rather a lot of work. And even when I had had my bath there was more, because we had to half-empty the bath by bucket and saucepan, pouring it down the sink. Then Lally used to drag the bath to the kitchen door and tip it down the big drain, and all the steam went up in the air like clouds.

  So it was a pretty busy sort of time. It wouldn’t have done with a Guest to entertain, so that’s why we were not having baths. Which was fearfully good. Our father had one this way once – but only once, because he tipped it over and the kitchen was flooded and the fire went out and Lally had a turn. He said he’d caught a chill and would rather be dirty, but we know that he went down to the Star in the village and had his there. So did our mother. It really was a bit more sensible, but Lally was braver and had hers, and we used to sit in the sitting-room and hear her singing, la, la, la, and splashing about and it sounded very nice and happy.

  So, you see, Friday was really rather a busy day, and especially this time because we were alone with Lally: our father had had his holiday and gone back to The Times, and our mother went with him to London for company. But we just stayed for two more weeks and then it was back to dreadful school, only, we didn’t think of that so as not to spoil the last days. Except Brian Scott Bromley would do that anyway, so what was the use?

  He wasn’t really so awful as a matter of fact. I mean, not like Alice McWhirter, who only had a father and was really awful. But he was pretty funny and used very difficult words which even Lally couldn’t understand. When he arrived on the six o’clock bus he was wearing his school uniform, with his cap on, and lace-up shoes, and we thought that was pretty peculiar for a holiday. Lally said, ‘Shush,’ when we mentioned it to her and that he hadn’t settled down with his new mother and that it all took time.

  He had sandy-reddish hair and a very pale face, glasses and red lips, and got up at the table every time that Lally did, even to get a spoon from the drawer, until she told him not to, very nicely. We thought that perhaps he was going to be sick or wanted to be excused or something, but she said it was just manners and a pity we hadn’t learnt some, but perhaps a few of his might brush off on us. Which we hoped they wouldn’t because good manners seemed pretty exhausting.

  Chapter 2

  The next day he looked a bit better because he had on a pair of shorts and a shirt, but still the lace-up shoes. He seemed to quite enjoy coming with us to see all our favourite places, like the gully and the smugglers’ cave up near Windover Hill, only he said it wasn’t one, but ‘in all probability’ was part of the old windmill, or had been a store for ‘ammunition’ during the Great War. You see, these were the sorts of words he used: ‘probability’ and ‘ammunition’ and lots more. And he read rather grownup books like Ivanhoe, which I thought was very dense, but he liked the river part where we took him, and even helped my sister pick a few waterlilies, the little yellow ones. He didn’t seem to mind very much when his lace-up shoes got all muddy, although he did say, quite loudly, ‘Oh! Hells bells!’ Which we thought pretty interesting.

  ‘I’m not quite sure what to call the woman at your house,’ he said when we were walking up from the river.

  ‘What woman?’ said my sister.

  ‘Well . . . the only one there. She cooks, and we had supper and so on last night and she asked me to help with the drying-up. That one.’

  ‘Oh. That’s just Lally.’

  ‘But who is she? I mean, what’s her name?’

  ‘Lally,’ said my sister. ‘She looks after us.’

  ‘But she isn’t Miss or Mrs Lally, is she?’

  ‘No. Lally. That’s all. We couldn’t say nanny when we were little so it got stuck at Lally. That’s all she is.’

  ‘Your nanny? said Brian Scott Bromley, wiping his muddy shoes on a big clump of dock leaves. ‘How infinitely quaint.’

  ‘She was our nanny. Until we grew up,’ I said.

  He looked at me very strangely, and made a funny laughing noise. ‘I see. But what should I call her? I can’t call her Lally, she’s not my nanny. I never had one.’

  ‘Well,’ said my sister. ‘Her mother and father are called Mr and Mrs Jane and I think her real
name is Ellen, but I don’t know. I heard Mrs Jane call her that once when she was cross about something. But usually it’s just Lally.’

  ‘I’ll call her Miss Jane. That would be perfectly correct, I’m certain.’

  ‘She’ll be rather surprised if you do.’

  ‘Well, I mean, one has to be decent about this sort of thing. The woman has a name and it seems to me correct to use it. I don’t know her familiarly, do I?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said, not knowing really, and being a bit worried by the grown-up sort of speaking.

  ‘Well, of course I don’t. First time I clapped eyes on her was yesterday evening when we got in from the bus. She seems a decent sort of person, so I would like to behave correctly. I think it very demeaning not to give her her proper station.’

  We walked up, crossed the road, pushed open the iron gate into Great Meadow and started the climb up to the cottage. But we didn’t say very much, because we didn’t really know what to say to Brian Scott Bromley. My sister crossed her eyes at me, when he wasn’t looking, and put a finger to her head, meaning that she thought he was a bit wonky. Which I was beginning to think too. But I pretended not to notice what she was doing in case he saw. And so she just clumped ahead singing any-sort-of-song and holding her khaki shorts up by pushing her hands into the pocket because they were too big really for her, and she had broken her snake-belt when she fell out of a tree when we were picking sloes.

  Just as we got to the beginning of the gully, I said to Brian Thingummy that it might be quite interesting for him to see the smugglers’ way to the cottage, instead of walking up Great Meadow, which was in the blazing sun, and the gully was shady and cool, and he said, ‘Very well.’ So we slid down a chalky slope under the trees, and heard my sister scream out in the field on top.

  It was quite a terrible scream, three very loud ‘Eeeee!’ s.

  ‘What’s the matter then?’ I called out through the tangle of ivy and roots from the bottom of the gully.

  ‘You’re vile!’ she shrieked. So I knew she wasn’t dead or bitten by an adder or something. Just furious. ‘How do you know the stallion isn’t loose in the field? It may be, but you don’t care. Oh no! Just leave me alone here and disappear down the gully. You’re a stinking beast.’

  ‘What’s the matter with her?’ said Brian Thing, pushing in his shirt where it had come out all bumfley from his shorts because of sliding down the chalk slope, which was the only way you could get into the gully because it was so overgrown.

  ‘I think it’s because of Aleford’s stallion. She is frightened it might trample her to death or something.’

  ‘Most unlikely,’ said Brian. ‘I mean, unless she provoked it.’

  I didn’t know what he really meant, so I didn’t say anything, and anyway she was coming down the slope and making a dreadful clattering noise scrabbling under the bramble and ivy.

  ‘Some people are so rotten’ she said. ‘I could have easily been frightened to death up there, all alone. In a field full of stallions’

  ‘You don’t know it’s there,’ I said.

  ‘You don’t know it isn’t there,’ she said as we pushed through trailing old man’s beard. ‘Don’t you think this is very nice indeed, Brian?’ she said, as if she had made the gully all by herself. So I quickly put that right – she was such a show-off.

  ‘The smugglers made it,’ I said. ‘Years ago. And they used to smuggle brandy and all manner of things down from the little church at the top of Great Meadow. It was their secret way to the village, you see.’ I felt quite pleased – that shut her up a bit.

  But then he said, with that squinty smile, ‘I very much doubt it. I think it was just a downland track which went up from the main road to the windmill at the top, beyond your cottage. You showed it me last evening.’

  ‘Our mother fell through the floor once, in the cottage, and landed in a terrible spooky cave thing right under the house, and they said it was an old smugglers’ cave and was part of a tunnel which came all the way from the church,’ said my sister. ‘That’s what they said. And they should know, they’re grown up, after all.’

  ‘Quite a decent idea,’ said Brian Beastly. ‘But I’d take it with a pinch of salt.’

  ‘It is the smallest church in England,’ said my sister. ‘We’ll take you there if you like? Unless you are an un-goddy sort of person. Are you?’

  ‘I don’t think it is the smallest church. From what my father told me it’s only a fragment of a much larger building. And it’s not the smallest in England. I rather believe that is in the north somewhere.’

  We walked along in silence for a bit. I mean, he did rather put you off all the time and it was quite hard not to give him a good bonk on the nose, only he was a bit bigger than me, and wore glasses. So I thought I would just change the subject and asked him if he had managed all right in his room when he went to bed.

  ‘Managed what?’ he said quite nicely, stooping under a huge tangle of bramble, which frightened a thrush so that it clattered off scolding.

  ‘Well, last evening. You know, with your po. Chamber pot,’ I said, seeing he didn’t seem to know.

  And he laughed sort of and said, ‘Oh thanks, yes, managed all right. I didn’t have to use the chamber pot thing.’

  ‘It’s the Guest’s one,’ said my sister. ‘It’s got a pheasant on the bottom.’

  ‘I just piddled out the window,’ said Brian Thing.

  ‘Out the window?’ I said.

  ‘Well . . . only once.’

  ‘The ginger beer,’ said my sister. ‘But how rude to do it out of the window. Just suppose Lally had been walking underneath.’

  ‘It was quite late, and I heard her saying goodnight to you both from her room, so I was quite safe.’

  ‘And right into the apple trees! I’ll never eat an apple off those trees ever again. And it’ll stain the tiles, I bet.’

  Brian looked very huffy, and his white face went quite red. ‘It didn’t go anywhere near the wretched apple trees. They’re miles away.’

  ‘Well . . . I do think it’s very rude, especially when you’ve got your own po.’

  We got to the end of the gully near the rubbish tip of old cans and bits of bedstead, and then we scrambled up the slope and the cottage was in front of us, all shimmering in the sun and behind it you could see the big clump of elm trees where the little church was.

  ‘If you don’t believe in smugglers, we have a witch’s house we could show you,’ said my sister, feeling quite brave again now that she was so near the cottage and could see Lally in her pinafore walking down the path past the lean-to. ‘She’s “gorn”, though, so you won’t see her, but he’ – she jerked her head at me as we started to climb over the rickety iron fence – ‘he could show you where she lived. It’s very creepy, and there are millions of cats everywhere.’

  Brian looked a bit startled and his shirt had come out again, so he tucked it back. But he didn’t say anything, so you could see he was a bit impressed by the idea of a witch’s house, even though it was just a caravan. But we didn’t say that.

  ‘If you’d like to come and see it, I’ll take you. It’s not far from here. About two miles along the Downs.’

  ‘Very kind,’ he said. But he was still looking at us in a peculiar way, as if we were dotty or something.

  Really. People are funny.

  ‘Brian!’ said Lally in surprise. ‘Where have they taken you? Your good shoes caked in mud! I declare, I can’t turn my back on you two without you go and do something underhand. Give them to me. Come along, take them off, it’s a fine summer’s day, you’ll come to no grief on the grass in your socks. Give them to me and I’ll clean them up in a trice, otherwise it cakes. Chalk does.’

  She was being very bossy but you could see Brian didn’t want a bit to take his shoes off, only he knew he had to, and you could see why when he did: there were huge holes in his socks. My sister was just about to say something about the holes – I mean, you could see that, and s
he had pointed – when Lally gave her a box on the ears, not very hard, and said, ‘Into the kitchen with you, Maddemoselle, and wash your hands . . . Fifteen minutes to lunch time.’

  We walked behind her to the cottage.

  ‘What’s for lunch, then?’ I said, because there was a bit of a silence and I thought Brian Thing was a bit pale looking at all his toes. Almost.

  ‘Tea, toast and six eggs,’ said Lally quite crossly and went into the kitchen with the shoes.

  ‘It isn’t really that,’ I said. ‘It’s just what she always says when you ask tea, toast and six eggs. It’s to put you off and stop you being a Nosey Parker, I think.’

  But he didn’t say anything, just looked rather uncomfortable, and suddenly Lally stuck her head out of the kitchen window. ‘Don’t loll about there, you two, wash your hands and show Brian where. And, Brian? – why don’t you take off your socks and go barefoot? It’s such a hot day, and I’m doing my wash this afternoon. You’re bound to have got them muddy . . . hurry along. And you two take off your sandals – I don’t want you traipsing about my kitchen with mud everywhere, thank you very much. Lunch in ten minutes . . .’

  Well, it was pretty silly telling us to take off our sandals because she never did before and they weren’t even muddy, but she did it just to make old Brian Thing feel at home, on account of he must have felt a bit silly sitting there on the grass in his holey socks. So we did and he did, and it was rather a nice feeling putting your feet into the grass and walking on the red bricks in the kitchen, and he seemed to quite cheer up. And so did I because it was my favourite lunch anyway: pressed tongue and pickled onions and damson tart for afterwards. It was quite funny really, because old Brian Thing quite forgot about his shoes and his holey socks, and he also forgot to say Miss Jane once. He just said Lally. Like we did.