At school they had chanted. They sat four abreast in their green uniforms, beans in a pod. Eight legs round, eight legs short, eight legs long, eight legs any variety.
Each day would begin with the chants of religion, falsified by Martha Cochrane. Later came the dry, hierarchical chants of mathematics, and the dense chants of poetry. Stranger and hotter than either were the chants of history. Here they were encouraged to an urgency of belief out of place at morning Assembly. The chants of religion were said in a hurrying mumble; but in history Miss Mason, hen-plump and as old as several centuries, would lead them in worship like a charismatic priestess, keeping time, guiding the gospellers.
55BC (clap clap) Roman Invasion
1066 (clap clap) Battle of Hastings
1215 (clap clap) Magna Carta
1512 (clap clap) Henry the Eighth (clap clap)
Defender of Faith (clap clap)
She’d liked that last one: the rhyme made it easier to remember. Eighteen fifty fower (clap clap) Crimean Wower (clap clap) – they always said it like that, no matter how many times Miss Mason corrected them. And so the chant proceeded, down to
1940 (clap clap) Battle of Britain
1973 (clap clap) Treaty of Rome
Miss Mason would lead them down the ages and then return them, from Rome to Rome, back to the beginning. This was how she warmed them up and made their minds supple. Then she would tell them tales of chivalry and glory, plague and famine, tyranny and democracy; of royal glamour and the sturdy virtues of modest individualism; of Saint George, who was patron saint of England, Aragon and Portugal, as well as protector of Genoa and Venice; of Sir Francis Drake and his heroic exploits; of Boadicea and Queen Victoria; of the local squire who went to the Crusades and now lay in stone beside his wife in the village church with his feet on a dog. They listened, the more intently because if she was satisfied Miss Mason would end the class with more chanting, but different this time. There would be actions which called for dates; variations, improvisations and tricks; the words would duck and dive while they all clung to a scrap of rhythm. Elizabeth and Victoria (clap clap clap clap), and they would reply 1558 and 1837 (clap clap clap clap). Or (clap clap) Wolfe at Quebec (clap) and they would have to answer (clap clap) 1759 (clap). Or instead of cueing them in with Gunpowder Plot (clap clap), she would switch it to Guido Fawkes Caught Alive (clap clap), and they would have to find the rhyme, 1605 (clap clap). She led them in and out of two millennia, making history not a dogged progress but a series of vivid and competing moments, beans on black velvet. Much later, when everything that would happen in her life had happened, Martha Cochrane could still see a date or a name in a book and hear Miss Mason’s clappy response in her head. Poor Old Nelson Not Alive, Trafalgar 1805. Edward Eight Lost the Nation, 1936 Abdication.
Jessica James, friend and Christian, sat behind her in history. Jessica James, hypocrite and betrayer, sat in front of her during Assembly. Martha was a clever girl, and therefore not a believer. In morning prayers, her eyes tight shut, she would pray differently:
Alfalfa, who farts in Devon,
Bellowed be thy name.
Thy wigwam come.
Thy swill be scum
In Bath, which is near the Severn.
Give us this day our sandwich spread,
And give us our bus-passes,
As we give those who bus-pass against us,
And lead us not into Penn station,
Butter the liver and the weevil.
For thine is the wigwam, the flowers and the story,
For ever and ever ARE MEN.
She was still working on one or two lines, which needed improvement. She didn’t think it was blasphemous, except perhaps for the bit about farting. Some of it she thought was rather beautiful: the bit about the wigwam and the flowers always made her think of Nine Climbing Beans Round, which God, had He existed, would presumably have approved of. But Jessica James had denounced her. No, she’d done something cleverer than that: arranged for Martha to denounce herself. One morning, at a signal from Jessica, everyone nearby had fallen silent, and Martha’s solo voice could be clearly heard intently urging the significance of sandwich spread, liver, and weevils, at which point she had opened her eyes to meet the swivelled shoulder, hennish bosom, and Christian glare of Miss Mason, who sat with their class.
For the rest of the term she had been made to stand apart and lead the school in prayer, forced to articulate clearly and to counterfeit an ardent faith. After a while, she found she did it rather well, a born-again convict assuring the parole board that he was now washed free of his sins and would they kindly think of letting him out. The more suspicious Miss Mason became, the more it pleased Martha.
People began to take her on one side. They would ask her what she meant by being so contrary. They would tell her that there was such a thing as being too clever by half. They would advise her that cynicism, Martha, is a very lonely virtue. They would hope she was not pert. They would also hint, in less or more obvious ways, that Martha’s home was not as other homes, but that trials were there to be overcome, just as character was there to be built.
She did not understand about building character. It was surely something you had, or something that changed because of what happened to you, like her mother being brisker and more short-tempered nowadays. How could you build your own character? She looked at village walls for bewildered comparison: blocks of stone, and mortar in between, and then a line of angled flints which showed that you were grown up, that you had built your character. It made no sense. Photographs of Martha would show her frowning at the world, pushing out a lower lip, her eyebrows clenched. Was this disapproval of what she saw, was it showing her unsatisfactory ‘character’ – or was it merely that her mother had been told (when she was a child) that you should always take pictures with the sun coming over your right shoulder?
In any case, building her character was not her chief priority at this time. Three days after the Agricultural Show – and this was a true, single, unprocessed memory, she was almost sure of that – Martha was at the kitchen table; her mother was cooking, though not singing, she remembered – no, she knew, she had reached the age where memories harden into facts – her mother was cooking and not singing, that was a fact, Martha had finished her jigsaw, that was a fact, there was a hole the size of Nottinghamshire showing the grain of the kitchen table, that was a fact, her father was not in the background, that was a fact, her father had Nottinghamshire in his pocket, that was a fact, she looked up, that was a fact, and the tears were dripping off her mother’s chin into the soup, that was a fact.
Secure within her child’s logic, she knew not to believe her mother’s explanations. She even felt slightly superior before such incomprehension and tears. To Martha it was perfectly simple. Daddy had gone off to find Nottinghamshire. He thought he had it in his pocket, but when he looked it wasn’t there. That was why he wasn’t smiling down at her and blaming the cat. He knew he couldn’t disappoint her, so he’d gone off to hunt for the piece and it was just taking longer than he’d imagined. Then he’d be back and all would be well again.
Later – and later came all too soon – a terrible feeling entered her life, a feeling she did not yet have words to describe. A sudden, logical, rhyming reason (clap clap) why Daddy had gone off. She had lost the piece, she had lost Nottinghamshire, put it somewhere she couldn’t remember, or perhaps left it where a thief could come and steal it, and so her father, who loved her, who said he loved her, and never wanted to see her disappointed, never wanted Miss Mouse to stick out her lip like that, had gone off to find the piece, and it would be a long, long search if books and stories were anything to go by. Her father might not come back for years, by which time he would have grown a beard, and there would be snow in it, and he would look – how did they put it? – emaciated by malnutrition. And it was all her fault, because she’d been careless or stupid, and she was the cause of her father’s disappearance and her mother’s misery, so she must
never ever be careless or stupid again, because this was the sort of thing that happened afterwards.
In the corridor off the kitchen she had found an oak leaf. Her father was always bringing leaves in on his feet. He said it was because he was in such a hurry to get back and see Martha. Mummy used to tell him in an irritated voice to stop being so plausible, and that Martha could very well wait until he had wiped his feet. Martha herself, afraid of provoking similar disapproval, always wiped her shoes carefully, feeling rather smug as she did so. Now she held an oak leaf in her palm. Its scalloped edge made it seem like a piece of jigsaw, and for a moment her heart lifted. It was a sign, or a coincidence, or something: if she kept this leaf safe as a reminder of Daddy, then he would keep Nottinghamshire safe, and then he would come back. She didn’t tell her mother, but tucked the leaf into the little red booklet from the Agricultural Show.
As for Jessica James, friend and betrayer, the chance for revenge presented itself in time, and Martha accepted it. She was not a Christian, and forgiveness was a virtue others practised. Jessica James, pig-eyed and pious, with a voice like morning service, Jessica James, whose father would never disappear, began seeing a tall, gawky boy whose red hands had the damp and flabby inarticulacy of a boned joint. Martha quickly forgot his name but always remembered the hands. Had she been older, Martha might have thought the cruellest thing to do was let Jessica James and her smirking courtier continue in knees-together smugness until the day they walked up the aisle past the Crusader with his feet on the dog and into the sunset of the rest of their lives.
But Martha was not yet so sophisticated. Instead, Kate Bellamy, friend and conspirator, let the boy know that Martha might possibly be interested in going out with him if he was thinking of trading up. Martha had already discovered that she could make almost any boy fancy her as long as she didn’t fancy him. Various plans now had to be discussed. She could simply steal the boy, flaunt him for a while, and humiliate Jessica James before the entire school. Or they might organize a little dumb-show: Jessica James would be taken for an innocent walk by Kate, and chance would lead her to a place where her prim little heart would be shredded by the sight of a porky hand clamped to a mild breast.
Martha, however, settled for the cruellest revenge, and the one in which she had to do the least. Kate Bellamy, innocent of voice, duplicitous of heart, convinced the boy that Martha might truly learn to love him – once she got to know him – but that since she was serious in matters of love, and all else that love meant, he would have to break irrevocably and publicly with Miss Piety before he stood a chance. After a few days’ thought and lust, the boy did so, and Jessica James was duly seen in gratifying tears. More days passed, Martha appeared everywhere in laughing profile, and yet no message came. Anxiously, the boy approached her co-conspirator, who played dumb and said he must have misunderstood: Martha Cochrane go out with him? The very idea of it. Furious and humiliated, the boy waylaid Martha after school; she mocked his presumption in anticipating her feelings. The boy would recover; boys did. As for Jessica James, she never identified the engineer of her misery, which pleased Martha until the day she left school.
As winters passed, it slowly became clear to Martha that neither Nottinghamshire nor her father were going to return. She still believed they might as long as her mother wept, used one of the bottles from the high shelf, hugged her too tightly and told her that all men were either wicked or weak and some of them were both. Martha cried as well on these occasions, as if their joint tears might bring her father back.
Then they moved to another village, one farther from school, so now she had to take the bus. There was no high shelf for bottles; her mother stopped weeping and had her hair cut short. No doubt she was building her character. In this new house, which was smaller, there were no photographs of her father. Her mother told her less often that men were either wicked or weak. She told her instead that women had to be strong and look after themselves because nobody else could be relied upon to do it for them.
In response to this, Martha made a decision. Each morning, before leaving for school, she pulled the jigsaw box from beneath her bed, opened the lid with her eyes closed, and took out a county. She never looked in case it was one of her favourites: Somerset or Lancashire, perhaps. Of course she recognized Yorkshire as the one she could hardly get her fingers round, but then she’d never had particularly strong feelings about Yorkshire. On the bus, she would reach behind her and push the county down the back of the seat. Once or twice, her fingers encountered another county clamped between the tight upholstery, one she had left there days or weeks before. There were about fifty counties to dispose of, and so it took her almost the whole term. She threw the sea and the box into the dustbin.
She did not know whether she was meant to remember or to forget the past. At this rate she would never build her character. She hoped there was nothing wrong with thinking so much about the Show; in any case, she could not stop it glowing in her mind. Their last outing as a family. Swung high to the heavens in a place where, despite the noise and the pushing, there was order, and rules, and wise judgment from men in white coats, like doctors. It seemed to her that you were often wrongly judged at school, as you were at home, but that at the Show a superior justice was available.
She did not, of course, put it like that. Her immediate apprehension, when she asked if she could go in for the Show, was that her mother might be cross, and that the Schedule of Prizes might be confiscated for having ‘given her ideas.’ This was another of childhood’s sins which she could never quite anticipate. Are you being pert, Martha? Cynicism is a very lonely virtue, you know. And what’s been giving you ideas?
But her mother just nodded and opened the booklet. The oak leaf fell out. ‘What’s that?’ she asked.
‘I’m keeping it,’ replied Martha, fearing rebuke, or recognition of motive. But her mother merely tucked the leaf back into the pages, and with the new briskness she was using nowadays began to look up categories in the Children’s Section.
‘A Scare Crow (maximum height 12”)? An article made from Salt Dough? A Greetings Card? A Knitted Hat? A Face Mask made from any material?’
‘Beans,’ said Martha.
‘Let’s see, there’s Four Shortbread Biscuits, Four Butterfly Cakes, Six Marzipan Sweets, A Pasta Necklace. That sounds nice, A Pasta Necklace.’
‘Beans,’ repeated Martha.
‘Beans?’
‘Nine Climbing Beans Round.’
‘I’m not sure you can go in for that. It’s not in the Children’s Section. Let’s look at the regulations. Section A. Open to Householders and Allotment Holders within a radius of 10 miles of the Show Site. Are you a Householder, Martha?’
‘What about an allotment?’
‘There aren’t any around here, I’m afraid. Section B. Open to All. Ah, that’s just flowers. Dahlias? Marigolds?’ Martha shook her head. ‘Section C. Confined to gardeners residing within 3 miles of the Show Site. I don’t see why we don’t qualify. Are you a gardener, Martha?’
‘Where do we get the seeds?’
Together they dug up a patch of ground, put in some horse manure, and built two wigwams. Then it was up to Martha. She worked out how many weeks before the Show to plant her seed, pushed in the beans, watered them, waited, weeded, watered, waited, weeded, lifted clumpy bits of soil away from where they might be coming up, saw the glistening, whippy sprouts break from the soil, encouraged the tendrils in their spiralling climb, saw the red flowers form and break, watered just as the tiny pods appeared, watered, weeded, watered, watered, and there, an exact few days before the Show, she had seventy-nine Climbing Beans Round to choose from. When she got off the bus from school she would go straight out to examine her plot. For thine is the wigwam, the flowers and the story. It didn’t seem blasphemous at all.
Her mother praised Martha’s cleverness and green fingers. Martha pointed out that her beans didn’t look much like those of Mr A. Jones. His had been flat and smooth, and the s
ame colour green all over, as if they’d been sprayed. Hers had regular bumps like bunions where the beans were, and speckly yellow bits on the skin here and there. Her mother said this was just the way they grew. The way they built their character.
On the Saturday of the Show they got up early and her mother helped pick the beans at the top of the wigwam. Then Martha made her selection. She had asked for black velvet but the only piece in the house was still attached to a dress, so instead there was black tissue paper which her mother ironed, though it still looked rather crumpled. She sat in the back of somebody’s car, thumbs on tissue paper, watching the beans stir and roll across the plate as they went round corners.
‘Not so fast,’ she said sternly at one point.
Then they bumped their way over a furrowed car-park and she had to rescue her beans yet again. In the horticultural tent a man with a white coat gave her a form with just a number on it so that the judges wouldn’t know who she was, and showed her to a long table where everybody else was laying out their beans as well. Ancient gardeners with jolly voices said ‘Look who’s here!’ even though they’d never met her, and ‘Have to look to your laurels now, Jonesie!’ She couldn’t help noticing that no-one else’s beans looked like hers, but that must have been because they were growing different varieties. Then they all had to leave because it was time for the judging.
Mr A. Jones won. Somebody Else was second. Somebody Else was commended. ‘Better luck next time!’ everyone said. Enormous hands with knotted knuckles solemnly reached down to console her. ‘Have to look to our laurels next year,’ the old men repeated.
Later, her mother said, ‘Still, they taste very nice.’ Martha didn’t reply. Her lower lip stuck out, wet and stubborn. ‘I’ll have yours, then,’ said her mother, and a fork reached towards her plate. Martha was too miserable even to join in the game.
Men with cars would sometimes come for her mother. They couldn’t afford a car themselves, and to see her mother taken away so quickly – a wave, a smile, a toss of the head, and then her mother turning to the driver before the car was even out of sight – to see this happen always made Martha think of her mother disappearing as well. She didn’t like the men who came to call. Some tried to ingratiate themselves, patting her as if she were the cat, and others stared from a distance, thinking there’s a pot of trouble. She preferred the men who saw her as a pot of trouble.