He wrote to Chris, a long letter. It was extraordinary to be writing one that would actually go into the post box. Other twelve-year-olds might have had to suck their pens and think of something more to say to use up another sheet of paper, but not Eddie Barton. He was well used to writing long letters about the state of the world in general and Shancarrig in particular.
The letter came back very quickly but it came addressed to Miss E. Barton. It had a Glasgow postmark on it. Eddie looked at it for a long time. It must be for him. His mother’s name was Una. But why had Chris Taylor called him Miss? Burning with shame he opened the letter.
Dear Edith,
I couldn’t read your name properly and maybe yours is an Irish name, but I hope I’m right in guessing Edith.
The letter went on, a friendly interesting letter, lots about Scottish fir trees and pine cones, a request to send some pressed flowers, an inquiry about whether it might be good to learn the Latin names of things in case it was going to be easier to find them when you looked them up – Chris had gone to the library and spent two hours looking up a very ordinary maple and couldn’t find it because he didn’t know it was called Acer.
Eddie read on, delighted. It was nice of Chris to take so much trouble to write, especially since he obviously thought that Eddie was a girl, and a girl called Edith. Ugh. He even asked what kind of a convent was it if the teachers were called Miss Ross and Mrs Kelly and weren’t nuns.
Then on the last page Eddie got an even worse shock. Chris was closing in hope that there would be a letter soon, and saying that he was delighted to find a kindred spirit on the other side of the sea, and then signed his name
Christine
Chris was a girl.
He went hot and cold thinking about the stupid mistake. She wouldn’t write to him any more once she knew he didn’t go to a convent school like she did, once she knew he was a twelve-year-old boy with baggy trousers and spiky hair. It was a great pity because that was just the sort of person he would have liked to write to. And it was her fault. Not his. She was the one who had the name that could have been anything. He had a perfectly normal male name, Eddie. He could imagine what they’d say at school if they knew he had got himself a girl in Scotland as a pen-friend when they were all finding fellows in India or South America.
Typical sissy Eddie Barton, they’d say.
He’d love to have sent Chris, whether it was a boy Chris or a girl Chris, some of the pressed flowers. All of a sudden Eddie realised that’s what he’d do, he’d pretend to be a girl. Just get her not to put the Miss on the envelopes any more.
*
And for four years Eddie Barton and Christine Taylor wrote to each other, long long letters, pouring out their hearts in a way that neither of them could to anyone else.
Chris told how her mother had this dream of moving out of the city and into a house on an estate, a place with a garden and a garage, even though they didn’t have a car. Chris hated the idea, she would be miles from the library and the art gallery and the places she went to when school was over. The girls at school didn’t want to do anything except go to the sweet shop and talk about the fellows. Chris sent a picture of herself in school uniform and wanted Edith to send one too. In desperation Eddie sent one of Leo which he stole from The Glen when he was visiting there.
Chris wrote and said she hadn’t thought of him as tall like that. She had a feeling from what he wrote that he was short and stocky and had hair that stood up. Eddie trembled when he read this as if she had found him out. He thanked the heavens that Scotland was so far away and that she would never visit. It would have been better still if she had been in Argentina, then the thought needn’t have crossed his mind.
It was hard to keep up the fiction of school life when he had left Shancarrig school at the age of fourteen and now went to the Brothers in the big town every day on the bus. He told Chris that truly he wasn’t happy at school and he preferred to talk about other things in his letters, like the rowan tree, like the fact that his mother was getting headaches from working too hard, like he wondered was there any way of finding out where his father was, so that he could just let him know what things were like.
He wrote about Father Barry and how he had been preaching about this village in Peru called Vieja Piedra and then had to stop, and people said the Bishop didn’t like money going out of the diocese to foreign places instead of being spent at home. Chris seemed to understand. She asked him why didn’t he help his mother with the sewing – it wasn’t hard, they could share it.
Eddie burned with frustration over that. He realised he had made himself sound selfish and unhelpful while his only crime was that he was a boy. Everyone knew boys didn’t do sewing.
He was getting on very badly at school, but he couldn’t tell Chris. How could he tell of Brothers who were loud and rough with him, who often hit him with a belt when he least expected it, and one who even mocked his stutter?
Chris asked him for another picture when he was sixteen. He had none of Leo. He couldn’t bear to ask her personally so he wrote her a note.
‘For a long complicated reason which I’ll explain to you some time, I need a photograph of you. I want you to know that it has nothing at all to do with that promise of marriage I once forced you to give. You are free from that vow, but could I have a picture next week?’
She didn’t reply, but then just before his sixteenth birthday he met her unexpectedly in the middle of the town.
‘Did you forget the picture?’ he asked.
Leo looked distracted. She hadn’t remembered.
‘Please Leo, it is very important You know I wouldn’t ask you unless it were. Can I come to the house and see if you have one?’
It was important. Chris had sent him a picture of herself on her sixteenth birthday a month back. A dark girl with big eyes and a nice smile.
‘No.’ He had never known her so adamant.
‘Well then, will you bring me one?’
She looked at him, as if deciding what would be the way that would cause less interference in her life.
‘Oh God, I’ll bring you one,’ she said.
He looked hurt. ‘I thought we were friends in a sort of a way,’ he said.
‘Yes, yes of course we are,’ she relented.
‘So, don’t bite my head off. It’s got nothing to do with being engaged.’
‘What?’
Eddie decided that Leo Murphy never listened to anything anyone said. She wasn’t like Chris Taylor who cared about everything.
Except of course that she thought Eddie was a girl, a fellow conspirator in life. Eddie had been forced to write and say that yes he had got his periods when he was eleven. He had managed to say that he fancied the film star Fernando Lamass and that he liked red tartan as a colour for a winter skirt.
But mainly Chris wrote about interesting things – she only descended into these female things every now and then. It always gave him a start.
He posted the photograph and waited.
He knew that she would write with a card for his birthday, usually flowers and bows and entirely unsuitable things he couldn’t show to anyone. This year it was a small envelope.
‘Do not open until Wednesday 29th,’ it said.
Eddie took it away to read when he was on his own. He had explained to his mother that he had this pen-friend, a boy in Scotland.
‘What does the Scots boy say?’ his mother asked him from time to time.
‘Not much. All about flowers and trees,’ Eddie would say.
‘Keeps you out of harm’s way, I suppose,’ Mrs Barton would say.
Eddie knew she sounded gruffer than she was.
In his bedroom he opened the letter from Chris and got such a shock that he had to sit down.
‘I always told myself that when we were both sixteen I would tell you that I have known since the very beginning that you were a boy. I was afraid to tell you that I knew in case you’d stop writing. I like you being a boy. You’re the n
icest boy I ever met in my whole life. Happy birthday dear Eddie and thank you for your friendship.’
His first feeling was shame. How dare she have made a fool of him for four years? Then bewilderment. How did she know? He had agreed to having periods, being at a convent, wearing a red plaid skirt. Then came an entirely different feeling. A feeling of excitement. She knew he was a boy, and she liked him. She was afraid she’d lose him. He went to the drawer where her letters were. He read bits over and over.
‘You are so easy to talk to. You really understand. You have a marvellous mind, people here are so ignorant.’
Eddie Barton was sixteen years old and in love. He went to Barna Woods. It was icy cold but he didn’t care. He found an old log which he sat on, and thought about the new turn of events in his life. He must put a letter in the post to her before six o’clock. There was no question of going to school, there was far too much to think about.
Through the day he felt overwhelming regret about some of the things he had written, whole paragraphs that she must have known were lies. Then he was swept with an irritation. Why had she asked him to help his mother with the sewing when she knew he was a boy? But he mainly wanted his letter to her to be perfect and to say what he felt without frightening her off. He took the picture out again. Huge dark eyes, like an Italian. Then his heart lurched. She had no idea what he looked like. She thought he looked like Leo Murphy. Well, no she didn’t, but she had no idea. Eddie wished he was tall and strong, that he looked like Niall Hayes’ cousin, Richard, who had come to visit. Everyone said he was so handsome. Eddie wished more than ever that he could find his father and ask his advice.
But his father didn’t turn up on Eddie’s sixteenth birthday any more than he had on any other anniversary, so he knew he would have to write it alone.
He decided to go to Miss Ross and her mother and ask if he could write the letter there. It would be warm and dry. There would be no fear of his mother asking him what he was doing, saying something that was bound to irritate him. He often did some work on the garden for Miss Ross, who wouldn’t mind him coming in on a wild cold day like this.
She was just coming back from the school for her lunch when he arrived. She wore a belted raincoat which swished as she walked along. Eddie wondered if Chris wore a raincoat like that. He might ask her but somehow it seemed a bit personal, that swishy sound. Something he didn’t want her to know about, and the feeling it gave him.
Miss Ross looked tired and pale. She said he was an answer to prayer. If he would just chop a few logs for her not only could he sit by the fire and write for the afternoon, she would give him a big bowl of soup as well.
‘It’s my birthday, Miss Ross. That’s why,’ he said.
She seemed to find the explanation perfectly satisfactory, and asked nothing about why he had absented himself from the Brothers without any permission. She couldn’t imagine Brother O’Brien saying to a lad of sixteen that he should celebrate the day.
‘What kind of a letter? Is it an application for a job?’ Miss Ross asked.
‘No. It’s more a letter to a friend.’ He was scarlet as he spoke.
‘Yes, well if the friend’s in a convent boarding school don’t forget the nuns might read it.’ Miss Ross was full of wisdom.
‘No, the friend’s not in a boarding school.’ Eddie knew he sounded stiff.
‘Well, you’re all right then.’ Eddie thought Miss Ross sounded as if she was trying to be cheerful for his sake. And maybe a little envious.
Eddie looked around the room before he began his letter. He had never noticed the house very much before, thinking of it as a place to take off his shoes before he came in from the garden. He remembered that Maura Brennan, who had been his friend at Shancarrig school, had always said she loved this house and that when she got old she would have one just like it, with lovely pieces of furniture that she would polish until they shone and china ornaments on shelves and thick rich velvet curtains. Eddie admired the colours; everything seemed to match with everything else, not like in his own home where the carpet was brown and the curtains were yellow and the table cloth was green; it looked as if everything was chosen to clash with everything else. He knew this was not the case, it was because they didn’t have enough money to get things that would look nice. His mother had great taste in the clothes she made. She was always advising her customers what went well with their eyes or their complexion.
But still, that didn’t help him to write to Chris Taylor.
He sat for a long time, the old grandfather clock ticking. Miss Ross had gone back to Shancarrig school; her mother was having her afternoon rest upstairs.
‘Dearest Chris,’ Eddie wrote. ‘I can’t tell you how good it is to be able to write as myself. I wanted to so often but once I had begun with the silly lie I had to keep it going in case you stopped writing. Your letters are the most important thing in my life. I couldn’t bear them to stop.’
And then it was easy. Page after page. He tried to imagine himself sitting in this small house in Glasgow. She called it a two up two down, meaning the number of rooms. Her mother had never realised the dream of moving to an estate. Her father kept pigeons and hadn’t much interest in anything else. Her two brothers were at sea and only came home for a very short visit now and then. She wanted to go to a school of art but she wasn’t good enough. Her mother said to get a job in the florists and be grateful for it; most people had to do work they hated. At least Chris liked flowers so she’d be ahead of the game.
What would this girl like to read from Eddie, now revealed as a man? He knew one thing. There must be no more pretence.
‘I’m small and square and have hair that sticks up. I don’t think I ever told you properly about school and how much I hate it, because when I was meant to be a girl I couldn’t tell you how rough they are there and how they think I’m as thick as the wall. I don’t think I am, and your letters make me think I have something.’
There was no trouble finding the words. When he read it over he thought she would think it was a fair explanation for his years of deceit. Not too much apology, more setting the record straight.
He was surprised when Miss Ross came back from school.
‘That’s a letter and a half, Eddie,’ she said approvingly.
‘Would you have said I was thick, Miss Ross?’
‘No, I wouldn’t, and you’re not,’ she said.
He grinned at her and ran off. She looked out the door and saw him heading for the post office, skipping and jumping over puddles.
The letters came fast and thick. They wrote to each other about hopes and fears, about books and paintings, about colours and designs. They kept nothing back.
‘If we ever meet I must show you the ferns of Barna Woods,’ he wrote once.
‘What do you mean “if we ever meet”? It’s “when we meet”!’ she wrote back, and his heart felt leaden because he knew he had made Shancarrig sound too beautiful, too exciting, too romantic for Christine Taylor.
‘That boy must have nothing to do but write letters,’ his mother said one day when the usual fat envelope arrived from Scotland.
‘It’s not a boy, it’s a girl.’ Eddie knew he’d have to explain some time.
‘What do you mean? Did he turn into a girl all of a sudden?’ Mrs Barton didn’t like the sound of it being a girl.
‘No, it’s a different one.’ Eddie didn’t feel that any further explanation would help.
‘Why Scotland?’ his mother said.
‘It’s nice and far away,’ he grinned. ‘If I have to be writing to a girl, Ma, isn’t it better that I write to one in a far off country?’
‘At your age you shouldn’t be writing to a girl at all. There’ll be plenty of time for that later. Too much time if you’re your father’s son.’
There had been much mention over the years of Ted Barton’s interest in women, always vague and generalised, never specific and detailed. Eddie had long given up the hope of getting any more information th
an the sketchy amount he already had. His father had been thrown out because of a known association with another woman. When he had left Shancarrig that night the woman had not gone with him. She might even be someone he knew. Someone he had spoken to. If only it was someone nice like Miss Ross then maybe she could have told him more about the man who had left their lives.
‘Did my father ever like Miss Ross?’ he asked his mother suddenly.
‘Maddy Ross?’ His mother looked at him in surprise.
‘Yes. Could she have been his love?’
‘Well, given that she was about twelve or thirteen when he left town it isn’t entirely likely, but that doesn’t say it should be ruled out either.’ His mother had even managed a wry smile as she said this.
Eddie thought she was less bitter. He must remember to tell this to Chris when he wrote; they had no secrets. She told him about her father being laid off in the shipyard and her mother getting an extra shift in the factory. Chris was doing Saturdays in the local flower shop. It wasn’t like she thought it would be, working with flowers. It was very mechanical, stiff little arrangements and awful cheaty ways of making flowers look alive when they were almost dead.
They wrote to each other when they should have been trying a last desperate effort at their books. Christine said that they were snobby in her convent and didn’t like the girls whose mothers worked in factories. Eddie wrote that the Brothers had a down on anyone with a bit of soul at all and that they had him written off as a no-hoper. The results of the exams were a foregone conclusion to them both.
In the summer of 1957 they wrote and told each other of poor results, bad marks and limited futures.
*
‘I had a word with Brother O’Brien. He doesn’t think it worth trying to repeat the year,’ Eddie’s mother said glumly. She had taken the bus into the big town to buy materials, threads, zip fasteners and spare pieces for the sewing machine. She had used the opportunity to visit the school.