I made my father tea that Thursday afternoon and I felt a bit shy because I hadn’t seen him for so long. He didn’t comment on my making the tea, although he might have said that I hadn’t been able to before. Instead he said he hadn’t had a decent cup of tea since he’d been home the last time. ‘It’s great to be home, Matilda,’ he said.
A few weeks later my mother told me he was dead. She told me at that same time of day and on a Thursday also: a warm June afternoon that had been tiring to trudge home from school through.
‘Belle Frye has to stay in for two hours,’ I was saying as I came into the kitchen. My mother told me to sit down.
The repetition was extraordinary, the three Thursday afternoons. That night in bed I was aware of it, lying awake thinking about him, wondering if he’d actually been killed on a Thursday also.
All the days of the week had a special thing about them: they had different characters and even different colours. Monday was light brown, Tuesday black, Wednesday grey, Thursday orange, Friday yellow, Saturday purplish, Sunday white. Tuesday was a day I liked because we had double History, Friday was cosy, Saturday I liked best of all. Thursday would be special now: I thought that, marking the day with my grief, unable to cry any more. And then I remembered that it had been a Thursday afternoon when old Mrs Ashburton had invited everyone for miles round to her tennis party, when I had realized for the first time that there was going to be a war against the Germans: Thursday, 31 August 1939.
I would have liked there to be a funeral, and I kept thinking about one. I never mentioned it to my mother or to Betty, or asked them if my father had had a funeral in France. I knew he hadn’t. I’d heard him saying they just had to leave you there. My mother would cry if I said anything about it.
Then Dick came back, the first time home since he’d joined the army. He’d been informed too, and time had passed, several months, so that we were all used to it by now. It was even quite like the two occasions when my father had returned, Dick telling stories about the army. We sat in the kitchen listening to him, huddled round the range, with the sheepdogs under the table, and when the time came for him to go away I felt as I’d felt when my father had gone back. I knew that Betty and my mother were thinking about Dick in that way, too: I could feel it, standing in the yard holding my mother’s hand.
Colin Gregg, who’d kissed Betty at Mrs Ashburton’s tennis party, came to the farm when he was home on leave. Joe and Arthur, who’d worked for my father on the farm, came also. At one time or another they all said they were sorry about my father’s death, trying not to say it when I was listening, lowering their voices, speaking to my mother.
Two years went by like that. Dick still came back, and Colin Gregg and Joe and Arthur. I left Miss Pritchard’s school and went to the Grammar School. I heard Betty confiding to my mother that she was in love with Colin Gregg, and you could see it was Colin Gregg being in the war that she thought about now, not Dick. Belle Frye’s father had had his left arm amputated because of a wound, and had to stay at home after that. A boy who’d been at the Grammar School, Roger Laze, had an accident with a gun when he was shooting rabbits, losing half his left foot. People said it was a lie about the rabbit-shooting. They said his mother had shot his foot off so that he wouldn’t have to go into the army.
At church on Sundays the Reverend Throataway used to pray for victory and peace, and at school there was talk about the Russians, and jokes about Hitler and Goring and most of all about Goebbels. I remembered how old Mrs Ashburton used to talk about the previous war, from which her husband had come back with some kind of shell-shock. She’d made me think of Germans as being grey and steely, and I hated them now, just as she had. Whenever I thought about them I could see their helmets, different from the helmets of English soldiers, protecting their necks as well as their heads. Whenever I thought of the time before the war I thought of Mrs Ashburton, who had died soon after she’d given her tennis party. On the way home from school I’d sometimes go into the garden of Challacombe Manor and stand there looking at the tall grass on the tennis court, remembering all the people who’d come that afternoon, and how they’d said it was just like my father to say the tennis party was a lot of nonsense and then to bring on beer and cider at the end of the day. The tennis party had been all mixed up with our family. It felt like the last thing that had happened before the war had begun. It was the end of our being as we had been in our farmhouse, just as in the past, after the previous war, there must have been another end: when the farm had ceased to be the home-farm of Challacombe Manor, when the estate had been divided up after Mrs Ashburton’s husband hadn’t been able to run it any more.
When I wandered about the overgrown garden of Challacombe Manor I wondered what Mr Ashburton had been like before the war had affected him, but I couldn’t quite see him in my mind’s eye: all I could see was the person Mrs Ashburton had told me about, the silent man who’d come back, who hadn’t noticed that everything was falling into rack and ruin around him. And then that image would disappear and I’d see my father instead, as he’d been in the farmhouse. I remembered without an effort the brown skin of his arms and his brown, wide forehead and the way crinkles formed at the sides of his eyes. I remembered his hands on the kitchen table at mealtimes, or holding a newspaper. I remembered his voice saying there’d been frost. ‘Jack Frost’s been,’ he used to say.
When I was twelve I began to pray a lot. I prayed that my father should be safe in heaven and not worried about us. I prayed that Dick should be safe in the war, and that the war would soon end. In Scripture lessons the Reverend Throataway used to explain to us that God was in the weeds and the insects, not just in butterflies and flowers. God was involved in the worst things we did as well as our virtues, he said, and we drove another thorn into His beloved son’s head when we were wicked. I found that difficult to understand. I looked at weeds and insects, endeavouring to imagine God’s presence in them but not succeeding. I asked Belle Frye if she could, but she giggled and said God was a carpenter called Joseph, the father of Jesus Christ. Belle Frye was silly and the Reverend Throataway so vague and complicated that his arguments about the nature of God seemed to me like foolish chatter. God was neither a carpenter nor a presence in weeds and insects. God was a figure in robes, with a beard and shreds of cloud around Him. The paradise that was mentioned in the Bible was a garden with tropical plants in it, through which people walked, Noah and Moses and Jesus Christ and old Mrs Ashburton. I could never help thinking that soon the Reverend Throataway would be there too: he was so old and frail, with chalk on the black material of his clothes, sometimes not properly shaved, as if he hadn’t the energy for it. I found it was a consolation to imagine the paradise he told us about, with my own God in it, and to imagine Hitler and Goring and Goebbels, with flames all around them, in hell. The more I thought about it all and prayed, the closer I felt to my father. I didn’t cry when I thought about him any more, and my mother’s face wasn’t all pulled down any more. His death was just a fact now, but I didn’t ever want not to feel close to him. It was as if being close to him was being close to God also, and I wanted that so that God could answer my prayer about keeping Dick safe in the war. I remembered how Mrs Ashburton had worked it out that by the law of averages some men have to come back from a war, and I suggested to the robed figure in charge of the tropical paradise that in all fairness our family did not deserve another tragedy. With my eyes tightly closed, in bed at night or suddenly stopping on the journey to school, I repetitiously prayed that Dick would be alive to come back when the war was over. That was all I asked for in the end because I could feel that my father was safe in the eternal life that the Reverend Throataway spoke of, and I didn’t ask any more that the war should be over soon in case I was asking too much. I never told anyone about my prayers and I was never caught standing still with my eyes closed on the way to school. My father used to smile at me when I did that and I could faintly hear his voice teasing Dick about his smoking or teasing my mother about the Aga cooker she wanted, or Betty about almost anything. I felt it was all right when he smiled like that and his voice came back. I felt he was explaining to me that God had agreed to look after us now, provided I prayed properly and often and did not for a single instant doubt that God existed and was in charge. Mrs Ashburton had been doubtful about that last point and had told me so a few times, quite frightening me. But Mrs Ashburton would be in possession of the truth now, and would be forgiven.
