Chapter 11
The car was driven by Linda Moffat’s uncle Bob, who had left the Moffat dairy farm and now ran the Co-op in Gatehouse and sometimes, when business was slow, drove people about.
He was a terrible gossip, like his niece Linda, and his eyes bulged all through the drive to Gatehouse Station, which was two miles outside the little town, at the edge of the desolate pine forests.
‘Goodbye, wee Tom Raven,’ he said, flicking Tom’s case out on to the ground and shaking his hand. ‘You’ll be off on the train now, for London, is it?’
Tom nodded solemnly, not wanting a fuss, but at the same time wanting this adult who was outside the situation to intervene, to say, This seems odd: shouldn’t he stay here? Can’t everything carry on as normal?
The branch line ran through Gatehouse from Stranraer to Dumfries.
At Dumfries they changed on to the London train.
As they pulled away from Dumfries, moving slowly through the dark red stone buildings and across the churning River Nith, so different to the tumbling burns of the Fleet and soft slate and stone of Gatehouse, a little girl, sitting on a wall by the river eating an apple, waved her hat at the train.
Tom felt a lump form in his throat – he didn’t know why.
He watched her in agony, his stomach hurting, as she waved again, her uneven stubby plaits shaking with the effort, her shining face beaming at them.
Aunt Jenny stood up and shut the window firmly. ‘Come, Tom, sit back, and let’s have some lunch. I expect breakfast seems a long time ago now. Sandwiches first, then the rest.’
She gave him two packets of sandwiches, which she had arranged with Mr Moffat – one ham, one mutton – but the smell of the mutton reminded Tom of the frozen sheep and made him feel sick.
He stared at the food, trying to will himself into wanting some; it was a tragedy not to be hungry when presented with a spread like this.
There was a bottle of pop, an apple and a bar of Fry’s Turkish Delight peeking out of his aunt’s satchel.
He thought perhaps he could manage some chocolate, absolutely, and looked hopefully at his aunt, but she did not seem to notice.
She smiled at him cautiously, as if he were a giraffe or a circus performer, something she had paid to see but wasn’t quite sure about.
‘Eat up, dear,’ she said. ‘Please,’ she added almost imploringly.
They had the compartment to themselves at first, and sat either side of the window, Tom glued to the view, watching the last of Galloway race past – the hills flecked with early purple heather, the sky, the vastness of the bay, the dark fringing of pine trees.
‘So, Thomas –’ said Aunt Jenny, nibbling delicately but furiously at her sandwich, like a little mouse. ‘Tell me what you’ve been learning at school!’
Tom stared at her. ‘School?’ He had been off for two weeks at Easter and could not have told you a single thing he had been learning prior to that. He glanced at his sandwich. The waxy greaseproof paper had margarine smeared over it. Nausea rose in his stomach again at the smell of the roast lamb.
‘Do you study French? How is your handwriting?’
The old teacher, Miss Nye, had hit Tom with a ruler across the hand every time he tried to write with his left hand.
It had got so bad his father had gone down to the schoolhouse and had a word with Miss Nye, but all that had happened was that an inspector came over from Dumfries and said Miss Nye was quite right, that he must learn to write with his right hand.
All this talk of ‘right’ and ‘write’ was so confusing to Tom that he had not understood, and so when Miss Nye tied his left hand to his chair to ‘help’ him he had thrown the chair across the room, only of course his hand was attached to it and the leg of the chair had caught both himself and Jean Davidson across the head, then Mr Davidson had gone to Dad and caused all sorts of trouble, and Jean and Linda called him an English madman, and after that no one would play with him and the name-calling began.
Lord Snooty, Scarecrow Boy, Tinker Tailor.
It was not the tying of his arm to the chair; it was the unfairness of it.
Surely it didn’t matter what blasted hand he wrote with.
Tom hated unfairness, from the big boys in the playground who pushed the smaller ones out of the way, to the housewives who pushed to the front of the butcher’s queue, to the old, old man who’d fought in the Great War who lived in a shack in the woods by Borgue because he’d had his cottage sold out from under him and survived by selling kindling.
He was about to try to say this when Jenny leaned forwards and took his hands. ‘Come on, my dear! I know you’re a bright boy. Can you name the English kings and queens?’
‘We didn’t go in for English monarchs much,’ Tom told her helpfully. ‘More Robert the Bruce. And we acted out the Rough Wooing.’
‘You did what?’
Miss Nye had left not long after the chair incident, and in place of Miss Nye came Miss Gillespie, who knew the names of all the birds and the poisonous mushrooms and what the different constellations were and set moth traps with a large gas lamp and had a grand passion for Lord Darnley, and life at the little schoolhouse changed, was full of wonder and excitement every day.
Miss Gillespie liked to link what they learned to their lives, to make it relevant.
But there was not much learning about fractions, it had to be said.
Edward Raven often walked the two miles to the schoolhouse to collect his son.
When Tom thought of his father afterwards, it was often like that: waiting outside the low small schoolhouse, set against the old graveyard whose listing stones were studded with skulls and bones, sometimes the only parent there (for all the other children lived in the village or near enough and walked back home themselves), his face lighting up when he saw Tom coming out.
There was one day when they’d been playing Spitfires at lunchtime, after Miss Gillespie had told them all about the Battle of Britain.
Ack, ack, ack!!! He ran towards his father. ‘Ack, ack! Dad, I’ve been playing Spitfires!’
‘That’s not the sound the Spitfire makes, Tom.
It’s like this.’ And he’d opened his mouth and from it this cavernous, howling, thrumming sound of power and speed had issued forth and he’d chased Tom and Ian Forsyth into the graveyard, the boys screaming with delight.
One of the girls had said later, sneering:
‘Why’s your dad pretending he knows what sound a Spitfire makes?’
‘’Cos he flew one,’ Tom said, not looking up from his blackboard.
‘In the Battle of Britain. But actually the plane he flew most was the Hawker Hurricane. He’s got a DFC, Distinguished Flying Cross –’ and then he looked up, just in case his father might be outside, might be listening, because he was so private about the war, never talked about it, ever.
‘Your dad got himself a DFC?’ Ian Forsyth was standing with his hands on his hips. ‘Nah.’
Tom had shrugged. He wasn’t that interested; it was long ago.
But when this was verified by Farmer Moffat, who was the only person who knew Edward Raven at all, the children treated Tom with more respect.
So, if anything, he despised them all the more somehow.
That they should like him and his father because of something from fifteen years ago, and not because of the people they were now, seemed so dishonest.
Through the edge of the Lakes and the barren, wild Yorkshire Dales they went, down into the heart of England, till the landscape grew less distinctive, the towns and villages at first spaced out, then more frequent, until, it seemed, they were all grouped together, like a folded concertina, and they were passing endless rows of houses and suburbs.
And suddenly it was dark, and even in the dark Tom could see a thick heavy fog draped across roads lit with weak street lights.
Finally, they were drawing into a vast concourse.
‘Welcome to King’s Cross,’ the announcer said.
Tom looked around. ‘King’s Cross? But – where’s that?’
Jenny lifted his suitcase off the rack. ‘Come on, dear. We’re in London.’
Tom stared about him, at the people bustling past, the porters, the taxis, everyone rushing, dashing, so smart, so unfriendly.
A split-second, flashing thought of everything that had occurred since he had held the tiny wooden house in his hand on his birthday morning zigzagged through his mind.
Flinging the door open to the sweet, wild smell of spring, luring him out into the hedgerows, up on to the hills, the toc-toc of his father’s pipe, the plan they had for the picnic on Carrick Bay on May Day.
Tom breathed in the new, wet, coal-smoke smell of London. He told himself not to think about home.
‘We’ll take a taxi,’ said Jenny, hurrying him towards a row of juddering black London cabs. ‘Since it’s so late.’
‘Evening. Smog’s bad tonight, madam.’
‘It is. Montpelier Crescent, please.’
It was that first journey through London that he would always remember – the buildings covered in soot and darkness, the lamps and lights gold in between, the sheer number of people on the streets.
After a while the rocking, sprung motion of the cab relaxed him, and his eyes grew heavy.
His head lolled against his aunt’s arm, and suddenly he was asleep, so deeply that he did not recall being lifted out of the cab by unknown arms, carried through an open door, up the stairs and into a strange bed where he awoke the next day, still quite unable to believe that he had left everything he knew behind in just one day.