‘Oh!’
‘Didn’t we say? We’ve been comin up here since we were little ones, Dan and me. When our folks wanted us out from under …’ She spoke in an offhand manner, busy rummaging in her bag. Daniel sat without speaking on the tree stump, intent on levering the lid off the liquorice tin. After a moment Lucy produced two school exercise books and held them out to me.
‘I can’t get the hang of the work, dear, you know that. I never could. And Daniel’s got no patience with it any more.’
Daniel was still trying to open the tin, so bent on the task, it seemed, that he couldn’t meet my eyes. His cheeks, though, were crimson.
I turned the books in my hands. Both were wretchedly dog-eared and ink-blotched, the arithmetic branded with red crosses, the grammar sentences petering out like tracks into desert sand. The owners would turn fourteen this year, as would I, and school would be finished for us all. Miss Yarnold had spent seven years trying to teach Lucy to read and write, and she had failed. Daniel was already far more use at a cattle auction than he was behind a rickety deal desk that was starting to squash his sturdy knees.
‘Do help us out, dear.’
Lucy’s voice was soft. I looked up, but she wouldn’t meet my eyes. She too had a rare dark flush on her cheekbones.
I sat down on a milking stool. ‘What will we do for pen and ink?’
The lid popped off the liquorice tin, and I was given two pieces, along with a nib pen and a phial of dried-up brown ink, which we woke with a drip from the kettle. I started to write up Daniel’s lesson, making sure the numbers and letters were as tall and wavering as his, my jaws fused by a glorious black salty sweetness that seemed to run directly into my veins. ‘Oh, this is delicious,’ I told him, somewhat slushily, from between clenched teeth. ‘Now, I’m making some purposeful errors—’
‘Oh, Ellen!’
‘Come on, Dan,’ Lucy said. ‘Miss Yarnold don’t believe in miracles. We don’t care about the marks. We just can’t stand to do it ourselves.’
Lucy’s figures I made small and hatched and oddly spaced, the spelling carefully idiosyncratic. Pausing to deliberate how Lucy might spell harbour, I stared up at the far wall of the shed, behind the armchair. Great towers of earthenware pots had been stacked there – long ago, it seemed, for the ones at the bottom were greened with lichen and moss, and some were cracked and crumbling. Lucy followed my gaze.
‘I don’t know how Bill sits there, under that lot,’ she said. ‘They’re an accident waiting to happen.’
‘All our days are numbered, Lucy Horne.’ Mr Kennet was standing smiling in the doorway. He tipped his hat at me. ‘I see they’ve collared you at last, Miss Calvert.’
I nodded, rendered mute by liquorice and a sudden shyness.
He took four mugs and a teapot and caddy from the shelf. I started up to help him, afraid that the things would fall from his few splayed and cradling fingers, but Daniel gave me a shake of the head and I sat down again. ‘Did you know,’ Mr Kennet went on, ‘I found that lickrish tin in the wood at Dammstrasse, in 1917?’
Lucy was gaping. ‘So it’s – how old, Dan?’
‘We’re in 1934,’ said Daniel, ‘so it’s …’
‘Seventeen,’ I supplied.
‘Seventeen years old,’ Lucy said, ‘and you’re givin it us to eat? That’s disgustin. Shame on you, Mr Kennet, for never tellin us.’
Mr Kennet arranged the tea things on the tree stump and sat down in the armchair, his eyes half-closed in quiet mirth.
‘Dammstrasse.’ Daniel turned to me. ‘That was his last battle, you know. Do you want some baccy rolling, Bill?’
‘Don’t you Bill me.’
A friendly growl.
‘Dammstrasse was just the way station,’ Lucy said. ‘The name of the battle was Messines. Let me do the cigs, Dan. I make ’em neater.’ She turned to me. ‘They blew a hole under Jerry the size of a coal mine.’
Mr Kennet nodded. ‘Well might you speak of mines, my girl. General Plumer touched ’em off and the whole world jumped into the air. Dawn broke so quick that day. I think the sun was hurrying to see what the row was about.’
I saw instantly from the way they nodded, Lucy and Dan – Dan sombrely lacing his fingers over his knees, Lucy busy with tobacco and cigarette papers – that they had heard this before, and it was not a time for questions.
‘When the sun was fully risen we moved off to Dammstrasse, on our way to Messines Ridge,’ Mr Kennet went on. ‘We were still deaf from the mines, so we were a pack of ghosts, it seemed like, with boots that made no sound. Sun rose higher, and soon it was a broiling-hot morning. I found that tin in the grass and tucked it in my pack. Seven o’clock we went forward. Then came my bit of shrapnel. Dan’s father, and Lucy’s, they went on to Passchendaele, but I came home. All three of us came home in the end.’
Daniel rubbed his chin. ‘I’ve always thought how funny it is, Luce. That both of us had uncles that copped it, and both of us had fathers that lived.’
Lucy, who was running the pointed tip of her tongue along the edge of a cigarette paper, stopped midway and cackled. ‘We couldn’t have had dads that copped it, could we. ’Cause then we’d never have been born. You great lummox.’
‘Colonel Daventry came back all right.’ Daniel went on with his thoughts, unperturbed. ‘But Sir Michael was properly crocked up. There’s no sense in it.’
‘No sense or meaning.’ Mr Kennet cast his eyes at the ceiling. ‘Who else, now? Mr Parr, of course. Of Parr’s Mill. He drove ambulances, got a medal for it too. Old Mr Parr, who had the mill before, was his uncle. But old Mr Parr lost both his sons at the Somme, and so now that he’s dead too, the mill has fallen to the present Mr Parr, his nephew, being the survivor of that generation.’
I knew who Colonel Daventry was; we used to see him on Boxing Day when the hunt left from The Place, his house with its huge courtyard at the front. A bright, friendly, ginger-haired man offering a stirrup cup to the Master of Hounds. Mr Parr was less distinct. Tall, I fancied, perhaps fair-haired, standing next to Lady Brock in church. I couldn’t be sure. There were a lot of such men in the front pews. Mother and I went so seldom that I never got to tell them apart. It wasn’t as if they were going to speak to us.
‘Miss Calvert, I would like to say …’ Mr Kennet cleared his throat. ‘I would like to say that Captain Calvert fought very bravely at the craters. At Saint Eloy.’
The kettle burbled slowly to the boil. My father was not singled out for valour, but all the same I had heard it before as a young girl, that he had shown courage under the guns. But I had only a grain of pride left, the rest blasted away by my searing embarrassment at the mention of his name.
‘I’d very much prefer it if you called me Ellen, Mr Kennet.’
‘Right you are.’ He proffered the tin. ‘More lickrish, Ellen?’
‘No thank you.’ It was still clinging to my teeth. My tongue felt stained dark with it. I started to smile. ‘It’s only the tin that’s seventeen years old, isn’t it. Not the liquorice itself.’