Meet Me Under the Clock Read online

  Sylvia tensed. Her hands started to feel clammy. This was when Mr Gould’s games stopped being fun. She had not the faintest idea what the answer was. In fact, she didn’t even realize he was talking about a number. She pictured a strange creature with four arms and four legs, with both Audrey’s and Raymond’s heads. The same cold dread filled her that she felt at school. She was about to be caught out and punished. She found she was gripping Laurie’s hand as tightly as he was hers.

  ‘You get nineteen,’ Audrey said straight away. Her handsome face looked back at Mr Gould with something like defiance.

  ‘And what if I take Laurie away from Sylvia?’

  ‘One!’ Audrey cried.

  Sylvia was beginning to feel thoroughly fed up with Audrey, though at least it meant Mr Gould might not ask her his horrible questions. Although they weren’t at school now, and no one would stripe her hand with a ruler until it smarted, like Miss Patchett did, she was already feeling churned up with nerves. Fortunately Audrey had also had enough of Mr Gould and his numbers.

  ‘Can we have some lemonade now?’ she asked.

  Stanley looked disappointed at their lack of stamina. ‘I think you mean: please may we . . . Go on then,’ he said. ‘Boys, we’ll carry on with this later.’

  No wonder Raymond and Laurie had both won places at the grammar school. When Paul was born, they were told he was a ‘mongol’. It was some time before Sylvia had any idea what that meant. When they were at last allowed to see baby Paul – she and Audrey vying to be the first to look into the pram – she could see that his eyes were a bit different, that was all. It didn’t seem to be so bad, she thought. But Stanley Gould knew what it meant and saw it as a curse – probably from God, because it was hard to know who else to blame. He seemed to believe that God might be as spiteful as that, and didn’t know what to do with a child who wasn’t clever. It had taken years for him even to begin to come to terms with it. For a long time he didn’t even like Marjorie to take Paul out of the house, which of course upset her.

  As she grew up, Sylvia often wondered why Dad and Stanley were friends. They were forever arguing. For a start, Stanley was a staunch member of the Church of England, while Ted said he wasn’t having ‘any of that old claptrap’. And that was before you got to their views on politics, the education of girls (which Stanley Gould thought was basically a waste of everybody’s time) or the best way to grow carrots. But the two of them drank together, went for long bike rides, played the odd game of cribbage and chewed the fat contentiously over the garden wall while their wives rolled their eyes. Sylvia realized, eventually, that they thrived on their arguments. Maybe that’s how she and Audrey had learned to fall out all the time.

  Despite pressurizing his sons, Mr Gould had a kindly side to him and could be a tease. It was he who had nicknamed Sylvia ‘Wizzy’ because of her dark, flyaway curls. The name stuck and her own family started calling her ‘Wizz’ sometimes as well.

  But that afternoon stayed painfully pressed into Sylvia’s memory and one reason was that Raymond, who was usually quite kind, had been unkind. Audrey had managed to stop Mr Gould’s number games, but Raymond wanted to carry on after the lemonade and cake.

  ‘What are nine nines?’ he demanded. He was good at tables, and so was Audrey.

  ‘Eighty-one,’ Audrey answered smartly. She and Sylvia were kneeling, tunnelling their hands into the pile of reddish sand. They gave each other a shove every so often, if one felt the other was too close. ‘Get off, that’s my bit!’ ‘No – you get off.’

  Sylvia loved playing with the sand and resented Raymond carrying on like this. She kept her head down.

  ‘What about six sevens, Sylvia?’ he demanded.

  Sylvia pretended she didn’t hear him.

  ‘Come on,’ Raymond said, standing over her. ‘It’s easy!’

  ‘Sylvia can’t do numbers and things,’ Audrey said in her superior voice. ‘She can’t even read.’

  Sylvia hid further under her cloud of hair to hide the red heat seeping through her cheeks. She squeezed handfuls of the coarse sand, longing to hit Audrey over the head with something. They knew she was bad at letters and numbers! They were so mean. None of them knew what it was like to see a mass of letters merge into a swimming chaos in front of her eyes until she was in such a panic she couldn’t think at all. With all her being she hated Raymond at that moment – and Audrey even more. But she felt too small and shamed to fight back.

  ‘Six sevens are forty-two,’ Audrey said airily. ‘It’s no good asking Wizz.’

  ‘Sylvia’s stupid,’ Raymond said. He stood rocking from foot to foot, chorusing, ‘Stupid-stupid Sylvia! Sylvia’s a du-unce!’

  Then Audrey joined in the chant, hopping from foot to foot in time with the words. ‘Stupid-stupid Sylvia! Sylvia’s a du-unce!’

  She thought she even heard Laurie join in, until she was surrounded by their jeering voices. Of course they teased each other often, but not like this. Not with this mean, humiliating nastiness. The words echoed in her head, filling her as if she would never be able to get rid of them.

  Sylvia got to her feet, keeping her head down so that she didn’t have to look at their mocking, superior faces. All she wanted was to crawl somewhere dark so that she could curl up and never come out. Trying to keep from sobbing out loud, she hurried away, down to the gap where you could walk through between the wall and the railway fence and into their own garden.

  ‘I’m not stupid,’ she growled in a fierce little voice. ‘I’m not, I’m not! I hate you . . . I hate you.’ She ran into the house, hardly able to see where she was going through her tears.

  Her teachers never understood that she was willing, but not able. Words and numbers ganged up on her. When they learned about the parts of flowers and fruit, everything went well until Miss Patchett wrote names by the arrows, pointing into the parts, and then Sylvia was lost. She sat staring at her slate in despair. A moment later she realized, to her terror, that Miss Patchett was standing over her.

  ‘What’s that?’ Miss Patchett pointed her scrawny finger. She was quite a young teacher, with wire spectacles, hollow cheeks and stony eyes.

  ‘It’s . . .’ The named bits of the flower scrambled in Sylvia’s head. There’d been something beginning with S, she was sure. ‘It’s a staple, Miss.’

  Miss Patchett slapped the left side of Sylvia’s head so hard that for a moment she couldn’t see straight.

  ‘It’s a stamen. As I have written perfectly clearly on the blackboard.’ She pointed witheringly. ‘See? Stamen.’ This brought another slap with it.

  The other children sniggered.

  ‘Yes, Miss,’ Sylvia murmured. She couldn’t see anything now through her tears.

  ‘Thank heavens your sister’s not like you!’ Miss Patchett said. ‘A staple,’ she went on, witheringly, ‘is for attaching one sheet of paper to another. Go on, girl – write the proper label on your flower.’

  Almost beside herself with panic, Sylvia leaned towards the slate, her hand so sweaty she could hardly hold the pencil. She breathed in. S. It began with S. She managed to write a wavery S, but then couldn’t think for the life of her what came next. There was a twinge in her lower body and she was frightened she might wet herself. Miss Patchett was leaning over her. Sylvia could smell her greasy hair and body odour, blended with the stale tea on her breath. She squeezed her eyes closed, fidgeting to avert the urgent pressure from her bladder, and said ‘stamen’ to herself over and over again.

  ‘Come on, girl,’ Miss Patchett insisted, standing tall again. ‘Keep still! What comes next?’ The class had gone quiet. Sylvia felt as if she was the only person in the world apart from her bony teacher with her nasty, slapping hands.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Sylvia was about to say when Jane, next to her, dared to breathe, ‘T.’

  ‘T,’ Sylvia said grasping this like a life raft.

  ‘T! Well, write it down then, girl.’

  ‘A,’ Jane sighed next. How Miss Patchett did
n’t hear her, Sylvia would never know. She was able to sit still now, for the crisis had passed.

  With Jane’s help she managed to get to the end of the word without another slap. Miss Patchett moved away and Sylvia gave her friend the smile of the rescued.

  She could draw a flower perfectly. Why could she not do the rest? She didn’t know, and no one seemed to understand. She hated school, every part of it except playtime, when she and Jane and some of the other girls played jackstones and skipping in the yard, at the other end from the rowdy boys. When she came home it was like being let out of prison. She tried to shut school right out of her mind so that the thought of it did not pollute the rest of her life.

  But the teasing at home was different. The humiliation and unfairness of it bit deeply into her. She felt it as actual pain in her body, an ache that spread all over her. As she ran inside, Mom heard her sobs and came out to see what was going on.

  ‘Oi, where’re you off to, Miss?’ Pauline asked as her daughter tore up the stairs. She stood in her apron, looking up. ‘Have you hurt yourself?’

  Sylvia curled up tightly on her bed in the room she then shared with Audrey. Hearing her mother’s steps on the staircase, she tensed, afraid this might mean more mockery or punishment.

  ‘Wizzy?’

  Sylvia opened one eye. Mom was standing at the door. She looked comforting, with her round pink cheeks and her auburn hair in thick plaits, pinned around her head and crossing over at the front. Sylvia desperately wanted someone to understand. Her reports from school were very poor, and her parents sighed over them in a way that Sylvia took to mean: Why can’t you be like the Goulds? Or at least like Audrey?

  Mom came and sat on the bed. Her pinner was dusted with flour and there was a whiff of onions about her as well.

  ‘What’s going on?’ she said. ‘I thought you were all playing next door?’

  Sylvia squeezed her eyes closed and pulled herself into an even tighter coil. Words burst out of her. ‘Raymond called me stupid. And Audrey! I hate them. Both of them are pigs.’

  Her mother gave a long sigh and Sylvia felt her hand rest on her skinny shoulder.

  ‘You don’t want to take any notice,’ Pauline said. ‘Your sister should know better than to talk like that – and Raymond. I don’t know why you and Audrey can’t get on a bit better.’

  Sylvia pushed herself up, limbs stiff with outrage. ‘I can’t not take any notice! They’re calling me horrible names and . . . And I’m not stupid!

  Mom was looking at her with a tender expression. She raised her hand, and Sylvia felt her mother’s work roughened, oniony thumb rubbing away the tears from her hot cheeks.

  ‘Look at your little face,’ her mother said fondly. She dropped her hand again and sighed. ‘I know you’re not stupid, bab,’ she said. ‘That’s the worst of it. Your father and I’ve talked about it. You’re as bright as a button. So why can’t you read and write properly, like the others?’

  Sylvia hung her head. ‘I don’t know. I just can’t.’

  Pauline had words with Marjorie Gould. Could she please ask Raymond not to be nasty and upset Sylvia? After that, they all kept off the subject. They never got to the bottom of Sylvia’s problems. Year by year she struggled on.

  The one person she felt at ease with was little Laurie Gould. He was younger than her and left-handed, so he struggled with writing. Stanley did not like having a left-handed son. In his day you would have been made to sit on your left hand and write with your right one – that was his attitude. Under the pretence of Sylvia helping Laurie learn to read, she would help him with his little story books; and he helped her, with Sylvia learning along with him. She did get the hang of reading and writing eventually, but she was slow at it. After Paul was born, even Stanley Gould stopped keeping on about success and ‘getting on’, now that he had a son who had little prospect of it.

  Sylvia dreamed of the wonderful day when she would be able to walk out of school and never come back. At last, when she was fourteen, the day arrived and it was one of the happiest of her life. She took her reference and headed away from the place of shame and humiliation, to a job – any job that did not involve reading or writing. At first she worked in factories and then a laundry. No one made her read or write. The work was boring, but restful. No one went out of their way to make her feel stupid.

  Raymond floundered at the grammar school and did not pass his exams with much distinction. He couldn’t sit exams without being paralysed by nerves, which Sylvia’s dad said was obviously Stanley’s fault (‘the silly bugger’). Raymond left school when he was sixteen, almost as glad as Sylvia to get away from it.

  Only when she was much older did Sylvia realize that Raymond’s nastiness that day was in some measure Raymond passing onto her what he felt about himself.

  Three

  22nd November 1940

  Just for once, everyone was at home. Dad had just got in from the Rover works on his bike and they were all eating tea together.

  ‘So, is lover boy coming round tonight then?’ Audrey said, with a provocative smirk at Sylvia.

  ‘No, as it happens, Ian’s working late,’ Sylvia said, determined not to be riled. She knew Audrey didn’t like Ian much. But then it was she who was engaged to marry him, not Audrey, so Audrey could put whatever she thought in her pipe and smoke it.

  ‘Ah yes, the great radiologist,’ Audrey said.

  ‘Audrey!’ Mom warned, hearing her sarcasm. ‘If you haven’t got anything nice to say, don’t say anything.’

  ‘But he is a—’ Audrey began.

  ‘Wench!’ Ted snapped. ‘That’s enough.’

  ‘I’m not a wench,’ Audrey muttered.

  ‘I wish I could join up,’ Jack said gloomily, ‘and liberate myself from all these squabbling females.’

  ‘They don’t want a little squirt like you, Afterthought,’ Audrey said. Jack had been such an unbearable know-it-all since he got into the grammar school that they were still trying to squash him. Audrey did tend to overdo it, though.

  ‘At least I’m not an embittered harridan like you,’ Jack retorted.

  ‘Ooh, swallowed the dictionary, have we?’

  ‘Audrey!’ Pauline snapped. ‘For heaven’s sake—’

  The air-raid siren wailed out, abruptly cutting her off. Sylvia’s heart immediately began to race.

  ‘Here we go,’ Ted said wearily, pushing back his chair, his tea only half-finished. ‘Those buggers are at it again. Best get weaving.’

  ‘Oh no!’ Pauline said, jumping up from the table. ‘We’ve only just sat down. You’ll have to bring your plates out with you.’

  ‘For heaven’s sake,’ Audrey groaned. ‘Not again.’

  ‘Those Krauts don’t care about your tea, Pauline,’ Ted observed, halfway out through the back door. ‘They’re not civilized people like us. I’ll go and get it opened up.’ Ted and Stanley had each put up an Anderson shelter in their gardens, halfway along.

  ‘At least we had last night in our beds,’ Sylvia said. ‘I’ll put the kettle on.’

  ‘There won’t be time,’ Pauline warned, but Sylvia did it anyway. The thought of a long night without a flask of tea was too much.

  ‘Get your siren suit, Jack!’ Audrey called.

  ‘Shut up, sis!’ Jack shouted, already halfway upstairs to fetch his things. The idea that he would be seen dead in a siren suit at his age was just another thing she liked to tease him about.

  They all scurried about as the siren wailed on, collecting up blankets, which could not be left in the damp shelter, torches and flasks and things to do. Sylvia found herself running back and forth in a panic, forgetting where she’d put things. Everything seemed to take forever.

  ‘I’ve got the torch. We’ll have to come in and fill the flasks if there’s a lull,’ Mom was shouting from the kitchen. ‘Where’re those rugs, Audrey?’

  They hurried into the freezing garden, wrapped in as many clothes as possible, with their plates of stew and rugs thrown over t
heir shoulders. The drone of engines was already close, menacing in the sky. Sylvia felt the cold biting into her cheeks.

  ‘It’s so clear tonight,’ she said, looking up into the cloudless sky. The full moon had waned, but the sky was full of criss-crossing searchlights.

  ‘Yoo-hoo!’ they heard Marjorie, from over the wall. She was helping Paul out to the shelter.

  ‘We’re just over here, if you need us, love!’ Pauline called to her.

  ‘Stanley’s here tonight,’ she replied. ‘See you after the All Clear!’

  ‘Come on!’ Ted was shouting from the shelter. ‘It’s all ready – and it’s dry.’

  ‘Oh my Lord, what about the cats?’ Mom cried. Usually they gathered up the two cats, Sherry and Brandy, and brought them into the shelter. ‘Here, Sylv, Audrey – take these things. The two of them’ll be under the bed, that’s where they always go.’

  But the planes were dangerously close.

  ‘Mom, leave them,’ Audrey said, bossy as usual, but for once Sylvia agreed with her. ‘They’ll be all right – they’ve got each other. They’ll be under your bed, you know they will.’

  Their mother hesitated.

  ‘Look, we leave Mr Piggles out,’ Sylvia said. The family’s pet rabbit stayed in his hutch during raids. ‘He’s all right.’

  ‘What the hell are you all playing at?’ Ted came charging out of the shelter and grabbed his wife’s arm. ‘Get in, wench.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ Mom was saying. ‘I don’t like to leave them . . .’

  For some reason Sylvia suddenly found the whole situation comical and got the giggles as they all ducked inside the shelter.

  ‘What the hell’s the matter with you?’ Audrey asked as they bumped about in the dark with only the jittering torchlight, trying to find a space to sit down.

  ‘Nothing.’ Sylvia couldn’t explain. It was how her nerves came out, wanting to giggle hysterically. But once she stopped laughing, a sober mood came over her. She couldn’t help thinking again what a tiny, flimsy thing the shelter was, when you set it against the destructive horror that could fall from the sky. She tried not to think about stories of direct hits on Anderson shelters.