It was not so many years since a child travelling alone would have attracted concerned attention – ‘Shouldn’t you be with your mother, my dear…?’ ‘Where are you going on your own…?’ But it had been the start of the so-called liberated 1970s: children went more or less where they liked and did more or less what they wanted, and respecting your elders was uncool, boring, a thing of the past. What’s it to you where I’m going, mister?
Mother had always said it was ill-mannered to talk in that way, but at least it meant nobody took much notice of a child travelling alone. And it turned out to be easy to slip into the big anonymous railway station and hide in the lavatories until it was morning and there were enough people milling around not to look twice at a child. It was easy, as well, to carefully study the glass-fronted maps in the railway station, and then buy a train ticket to Peterborough which seemed to be the nearest big town to Mowbray Fen, although it was suddenly heart-bumpingly anxious to sit waiting for the train to come in. What if police come storming in before the train arrives, looking for me? What would I do?
But the train came in, and once on it, once it started away from the station, it was possible to feel safer. I’m going away from Pedlar’s Yard, and the farther I go, the safer I am. I am nothing to do with Pedlar’s Yard any longer and I am nothing to do with North London any longer. I am a person travelling to Lincolnshire, going to visit my grandmother. The words brought a deep satisfaction. Just as the names of the villages and towns learned from mother had been a litany to blot out the brutality, so now was the phrase ‘going to visit my grandmother’ a charm that could be recited to inquisitive grown-ups. I am going to visit my grandmother who lives in Mowbray Fen. The wheels of the train sang the names of the stories. Thorney and Witchford and Whissendine. Rockingham Forest and going-to-see-grandmother.
Peterborough was finally reached after lunch, and from there on, buses had to be taken, but this also turned out to be easy. People at bus stations could be politely asked for directions, although once a stout, bossy-looking woman said sharply, ‘Shouldn’t you be at school?’ and there was a breath-snatching moment of panic. But it was easy to point to a well-dressed female on the other side of the square and say there was Mother, and that there had been a dentist’s appointment that afternoon.
Seeing the sign that said ‘You are entering the County of Lincolnshire’ brought a lurch of delighted expectation. Lincoln. Robin Hood and Sherwood Forest. And Pedlar’s Yard was a long way behind now, and clearly the money was going to last, which was one huge worry out of the way. It was even possible to be interested in things like newspaper headlines on placards. The Space Race – America and Russia sending up Apollos and Pioneers and probe-ships to Mars. And there were stories about the fairly shocking musical, Jesus Christ, Superstar, and about the really shocking films like Last Tango in Paris, and Deep Throat. People had sniggered about Deep Throat at school, but films and musicals had not played any part in the life of Pedlar’s Yard. Because there had been no money for them, or because there had been no understanding of how marvellous things like that could be? Yes, but one day I’m going to be grown up and then I’m going to know about films and music and books.
And then at last there was a bus that left Grantham, which rumbled along through all the places with the fairytale names. Thorney and Witchford and Whissendine. Parson Drove and Kings Cliffe and Collyweston…There was the feeling of being pulled deeper and deeper into Mother’s stories.
And now Mowbray Fen, just the tiniest of tiny villages on the edge of the Lincolnshire Wolds, was only a few miles away, which meant the house in the marshes was only a few miles away as well. And when I get there I’ll really have escaped, and I’ll have stepped into a different world.
Shall I change my name for that different world? Tear up the birth certificate and be called something entirely new? Would it be safer to do that, so that nobody could ever know about Pedlar’s Yard? What could I be called?