In my childish illusions of romance, Duke and Barbara were ideally matched, and I expected them to be drawn to each other. It didn’t cross my mind that he was married, let alone a father, and I’m sure Barbara didn’t suspect it, either.
Things developed less smoothly than I hoped. When Mrs. Lockwood appeared in midmorning, carrying two steaming teapots, we all stopped for a break, and Duke sat at a distance from Barbara. Most of the men drank cool cider from the owls and firkins they’d filled at the start of the day, but the girls preferred tea. I noticed that one of the casuals hired for the picking fetched a mug for Barbara. He stretched out on the grass at her side, practically touching her. I learned that his name was Cliff and that he had no regular work. Sometimes he helped behind the bar in the local. I wouldn’t have classed him as good-looking. Tall, dark, and unhandsome. All right, say it: I was a jealous brat.
The other GI, Harry, soon made inroads with Barbara’s friend, Sally, giving her a Lucky Strike to smoke and finding bits of twig in her hair that took ages to remove. Harry was more the Cagney type, wisecracking and pugnacious. He told us he’d had three stripes and lost them for some misdemeanor. Harry worried me. I didn’t want anything to go wrong.
When we resumed, Duke took a turn up one of the trees, and I noted smugly that Barbara joined the girls working from his ladder. After a while she advised him to leave some griggling apples on the bough he was stripping. He leaned on the branch, looked down, and asked, “What’s a griggling apple, for the love of Mike?” Barbara explained the folklore that any small apples had to be left on the trees for the pixies. Some of the girls hooted with laughter, expecting the GIs to join in, but Duke listened solemnly. Dialect words and country customs fascinated him. So Farmer Lockwood, who had a dry turn of humor, called out as he passed, “Come on, you lasses! Have Lawrence got into ‘ee?” and Duke had to be told that Lazy Lawrence, the guardian spirit of orchards, transfixed anyone who tried to cheat the fairy folk.
Disturbing things happened in the orchard that September afternoon. If, like me, you don’t believe in malign forces, you may think the cider at lunch had something to do with it. Or perhaps it was just the heady excitement produced by country girls mixing with American soldiers.
We’d gathered round an ancient wagon heaped with fallen apples of many colors, used to make the “windfall cheese” that would produce the first cider. The men sat on the shafts, the girls on upturned baskets, eating the bread and cheese with slices of onion that they’d brought in rush baskets and red handkerchiefs. Shafts of sunlight probed through the leaves overhead.
After we’d eaten, the girls showed the GIs how to tell your true love with an apple skin, peeling it in one piece and throwing it over your head to see if it fell in the shape of a letter. Harry’s fell conveniently into an 5, and Sally kissed him amid shrieks of excitement, but Duke refused to try the experiment. They persuaded him instead to throw an apple high in the air, without telling him the purpose of the game. Several girls rushed to catch it, leaping like rugby players, but no one caught it cleanly. It bounced loose, across the grass, straight to Barbara, who hadn’t joined in. She picked it up.
Someone handed her a knife. With everyone crowding round, she cut it cleanly in half and showed us two pips. The girls chorused, “Tinker, tailor,” and I realized that this was a version of the fortune-telling game my mother had once taught me to play with plum stones. A boy was supposed to discover what job he would have in adult life; a girl would find out what her true love would be.
She took one of the halves and bisected it. There were no pips showing. She cut the opposite half. Someone (I think it was Sally) shouted triumphantly, “Soldier!”-but the word froze on her lips because the knife had cut clean through the pip. Apparently it was a bad omen. Barbara threw aside the pieces of apple and said, “Silly nonsense, anyway.”
After lunch I didn’t see much of Barbara. She was collecting farther up the orchard, with her brother Bernard, I believe. I heard one of the girls say, “It don’t seem worth crying over,” and the other gave a shrug and moved on.
Towards four, Mrs. Lockwood brought out tea and cakes and we assembled along the dry-stone wall where the sun was warmest. Sally was sitting in the jeep with Harry. Duke leaned against a tree, whittling at a piece of dead wood he’d found. I couldn’t see Barbara, but each time a break was called, some of the girls would leave us to use the farmhouse toilet.
She still wasn’t back when Mr. Lockwood gave the word to start again. I noticed Mrs. Lockwood look anxiously about her before she picked up the tray and returned to the house. A short while later she was back to speak to her husband. He handed his ash pole to Harry to take a turn and marched off into the thick of the orchard.
I sensed trouble for Barbara. Soon a figure appeared from the direction Mr. Lockwood had taken. It was the man Cliff, whose interest in Barbara I’d noticed earlier. He marched briskly towards us, ignoring some mild taunts about skiving. Without a word to anyone he continued straight to the wall where the bikes were lined up, collected his, and cycled away up the lane.
Then I saw Barbara coming from the same direction, closely followed by her father. Her hair was hanging loose, and she was carrying the scarf she’d used as a fastening. As she came closer I saw that she was crying. She broke into a run. Ignoring everyone, including her mother, who stepped towards her asking, “Barbara, my love, what is it?” she ran through the gate towards the house.
Mr. Lockwood spoke briefly to his wife, and they followed Barbara.
At this point you’ll be wanting to know precisely what had happened. I can tell you that Alice broke into my narrative and asked if it was a sexual attack.
I reminded her that I was just a child. If there was gossip, as I’m sure there must have been, they didn’t let me in on it. All I know for certain is that Cliff Morton didn’t appear again for the apple picking, and nobody would mention the incident in my presence in the house. I saw marks on Barbara’s throat that I now know to be love bites, and I heard her mother’s low voice through the wall, questioning her by the hour in her bedroom that night, but the words were inaudible.
Alice wasn’t satisfied. She didn’t seem able to accept that at nine years old I was clueless about sex. She kept insisting that I must have heard something, if not from the family, then from the village girls. If I did, it didn’t make sense to me at the time, and I haven’t retained it. I’ve told you the facts I remember.
Alice folded her arms and said, “I don’t believe this!”
“All right,” I told her evenly. “I’ll save my breath.”
SIX
She blinked rapidly two or three times, and her mouth trembled as if she were about to cry. She said huskily, “For pity’s sake, Theo, don’t clam up on me now.”
I told her, “Leave it, then. I can tell you what I remember and that’s all.”
“But you must have thought about it since.”
“Often.”
“In that case…”
“My thoughts won’t help you. Let’s stay with my memories. Christ, we’ll be here all night if we get into speculation.”
Alice lowered her head and drew her arms tightly across her chest. “I’ve got to live with this tragedy for the rest of my life.”
The self-pity didn’t move me. I said sharply, “I was part of it. How do you think I feel, forced to go over it again?”
“Sorry.” She straightened up and moved her hand across the table in a placating gesture. “I won’t interrupt again, Theo. I promise.”
I took up the story.
The stacks in the orchard multiplied during that last week of September 1943, and diffused sweet-sharp aromas through the crisp air. I joined the pickers at every opportunity, reluctantly fitting school and sleep into the intervals. While I was working, the homesickness hardly troubled me at all.
One evening after tea the GIs unexpectedly drove in to spend a few more hours with us. I was elated,
