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Chapter Six
Toy Town

Rain swelled and darkened in the sky. Eliza practised the complicated French hop, thinking that at last the Hannays had scored over the Vaughans. Mr Vaughan, it had come out, was traveller for a German firm; everybody had envied his Sunday car, but now they said, ‘Look how he gets it,’ and when Jock Vaughan cheeked Carly, Augusta marched up to the Vaughan door and gave Mrs Vaughan a right-down piece of her mind. ‘The idea of your children calling Carly the Kaiser. The cap fits nearer home, Mrs Vaughan, the cap fits nearer home.’ Her voice carried down into the backyard, where Carly and Eliza and Sandra sat listening, Carly still a bit tearful, and gave them a delightful sense of triumph. Eliza repeated it as she hopped: ‘The idea of you calling us the Kaiser, Ngaio and Jock Vaughan, the very idea. The cap fits nearer home.’

Unnaturalized Germans were interned on Somes Island, in the middle of Wellington Harbour. Three of them swam for the mainland one night, and one was left dying of cold on the rocks. ‘Just like Germans to leave their friend in the lurch,’ said Augusta; the others were soon caught and sent back, so it didn't matter.

And in all the butcher-shops, pink-rinded German sausage, with the delicious little triangles of bacon fat, had become ‘Belgian sausage’. Belgium is brave little Belgium, one of our Allies.

Half-way down Calver Street, standing on his iron-railed balcony, the Silly Boy swayed and smiled, dipping from his middle to the dusty-headed cabbage tree. His smiling face sagged back, chinless; his body, in its good black clothes, bent in a rickety way at the waist. His hands were like queer white creepers clutching the balcony rail, and down on him poured hard sun, the red oil from the cruse of clouds. Sometimes in Calver Street you could hear the military bands flare forth from Island Bay; then the main-streets looked exactly like torn brown-paper bags, with peanuts rattling out, men in khaki. But the Silly Boy never took any notice. Smile and sway… smile and sway…

The Flint boys, whose mother went backwards and forwards from the Asylum, had lumbered off months ago in their khaki, serious and page 66 nice. Not long afterwards, Mrs Flint came screeching over to the Hannays’ door, her grey hair flying, and cried that Augusta had killed her Joe and buried him in the backyard. It seemed so funny, because the backyard was covered over with asphalt, and anyone could see it would be impossible to bury even a cat there. A policeman had to be called when Mrs Flint started waving the chopper about, but afterwards Augusta, instead of being furious, only put her hands over her eyes. ‘The poor thing. The poor thing.’

Rain began to fall in bouncing drops like marbles, down on the Silly Boy's bare head and and the cabbage tree dying of dust. Eliza heard her mother calling for her to come home at once and do a message. She answered, ‘Oh, all right,’ and dragged one foot after another up the gutter. She hated going home. It was all right for Carly, but Eliza didn't like babies much.

The back door was open, and Augusta stood peeling potatoes over the sink. Behind, Eliza could see the dim and gentle outline of Carly, sitting in the kitchen with the blinds drawn down, rocking the cradle. She tiptoed in, but Carly, looking up, said instantly, ‘Sssh, you'll wake him,’ and she saw that, as usual, Kitch had gone to sleep with Carly's little finger in his sea-anemone mouth. He had a red little face with waxy nostrils, and he cried too much, but Carly adored him. She had known that he was coming. When Eliza and Sandra were so surprised, Carly wrinkled up her face in superior wisdom. ‘I knew all the time.’

‘Mother always favours you,’ Sandra complained. But for the first few weeks, while Augusta was in bed, they were too busy intriguing against Mrs Maguire to care how the war-baby came, or why.

Mrs Maguire was supposed to be the housekeeper and Augusta's nurse, but she stacked the dishes in great greasy piles for the children to wash when they came home from school, strained and jerked their hair into tight pigtails that took all the curl out, and read German atrocities out of the newspapers when she was supposed to be bathing Kitch. She could read with her mouth half-full. Nearly always she said, ‘Well, I think I'll just have a snack,’ and they met her coming out of the pantry with a carving-knife and pink hunks carved off the joint for tomorrow.

‘She's a cockroach,’ said Sandra, ‘a big, damn cockroach.’ Carly said patiently, ‘You mustn't say Damn, or God won't look after Daddy at the front.’ She was very logical about God; no good behaviour, no pie. Every night they knelt down by their beds, and when they had finished their ordinary prayers said in chorus, ‘And bless dear Daddy and keep him safe, and bless-all-the-poor-soldiers-and-sailors- page 67 on-sea-and-land-and-bring-them-all-safe-back-home-again-for-Christ's-sake-Amen.’ Sandra was always in a hurry to finish her prayers—she got chilblains—and the poor soldiers and sailors ended in a little slither.

They were all glad when Mrs Maguire went away; Augusta threw the dummy out of the window, and said her baby must never touch that filthy thing again. Kitch howled and howled, until Carly discovered that if he sucked her little finger he went off to sleep quite as well as with the dummy. She was his godmother when Mr Arden baptized him at Saint Monica's in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. He was Kitchener for Lord Kitchener, John for Daddy, and Louvain for a town in Belgium that the Germans had burned down.

Kitch at first was very bald, but the down came in golden-brown streaks on his skull. ‘He's got lovely hair,’ said Carly proudly. ‘You can touch it, if you like, but whatever you do, don't wake him up.’ Eliza stroked the golden-brown. ‘It is silky,’ she said in a whisper, and Carly looked so pleased; but really Eliza didn't like him or want him, she thought he was like a little pink slug, and hated the way he opened his mouth and cried whenever he liked, even when he'd got everything he wanted. It was different to cry when you were hurt or sorry or enraged, but how could that pink formless thing feel troubles?

‘Eliza,’ said their mother, ‘I told you I wanted you for a message, not to hang about. You can do the blind alphabet, can't you? Well, just run down the street and tell old Miss Pyritt the war news. I'm too busy, and I know that niece of hers has gone gadding off to town again, I saw her through the window.’

Eliza lingered.

‘I don't like going there, Mother. She's got a funny smell.’

‘If you were as old as that, you'd have a funny smell. She's got her two nephews fighting for you, all she has in the world. You do what I tell you, and look smart about it.’

Straggling yellow weeds grew in Miss Pyritt's garden, and the door had panes of opaque pink glass. The real reason Eliza didn't want to go inside was that one night she had had a terrible nightmare about this place. She stood on the doorstep and pressed the doorbell, and something—not Miss Pyritt, something big and flat and round—came flopping down the stairs to meet her. She could see its shape, like a vast jelly-mould, through the opaque glass, before she fled shrieking.… In real life, it was no use ringing the doorbell, Miss Pyritt couldn't hear. Gingerly Eliza turned the key and walked in. Miss Pyritt sat in her kitchen before the stove, which had a softly-smouldering mouth of flame; her black cat rubbed softly against the thick black wool of her page 68 stockings, which were gnarled like the bark of a tree, on account of her rheumatism. When Eliza touched her on the shoulder, she lifted her face. Both her eyes were covered with pearly cataracts, and she couldn't hear a word. She was very thin, sallow as old parchment, and her hands were all knuckles.

Eliza knelt down, and taking Miss Pyritt's right hand pressed her fingers against it. Miss Pyritt, who could speak, repeated letter after letter as Eliza made them. Double loop of first finger and thumb for B, knuckle pressed into palm for R, touch third finger-tip for I. Slowly the necessary words, ‘British victory,’ were spelt out. Carly was much quicker at the deaf-and-blind alphabet than Eliza, and often in class the big girls used it if they wanted to talk secrets.

‘Many dead?’ croaked Miss Pyritt. Eliza spelt, ‘No—not ours; big German losses.’ With minor variations, this was all the war news Miss Pyritt got from her neighbours. The cat's purring was growly, a little thunder in the deaf and blind room.

‘Thank you, my dear, thank you. That is news we must be grateful for. We must all thank God.’ She pressed Eliza's hands between her two palms; their skin was yellow and detached, like your heel when you have been in bed for a fortnight with the measles. ‘A child's hand,’ she said, ‘a child's hand.’

Rain fell hard in oblique sharp lines on the other side of the pink glass doors, but Eliza was glad to get out in it. Her face drank the rain, she even tasted it on her tongue. She cried, and did not know why she cried. She walked in the yellow brim-full gutters and cried, and did not want ever to go home.

War is long, slender rows of names between two black lines in the evening paper. Some of the names have a star against them. War is little pictures.

Lord Kitchener is drowned. Carly cries softly, for pity, and because Kitch is his namesake. But Augusta puts her head down on the kitchen table, rests her face on her outstretched arms. The children have never seen her do that before. Kitchener's picture, brass-framed, scowls severely down at her.

‘My poor country. Oh, my poor country. What has she done to deserve it?’

‘Stand up, the girls with more than three spelling errors. This is your imposition. You are to write twenty times, “I am a German.”’

Young Mr Gillan, the third master, who is only twenty and has already enlisted, thinks he's smart. Soon he is going into camp at Featherston. Eliza feels heroism making a hard knob in her throat, and rises.

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‘Please, Mr Gillan, we won't write that.’

Mr Gillan stares hard.

‘Won't you?’ His cane cuts soft swishes in the air.

‘No, Mr Gillan, we'd sooner have the cane.’

The other girls with more than three spelling errors get caught up into drama. ‘We won't write it, Mr Gillan, we'd sooner have the cane.’

‘Very well. You can write “I am a Britisher” fifty times instead of twenty.’

He catches Eliza's eye. He has a devilish little twinkle, and a black moustache.

‘Please, Mr Gillan, we'd love to do that.’

Auckland is further ahead with the Copper Trail than Wellington, and that is a disgrace for Wellington. The Copper Trail, a huge snake of pennies, has to cover the whole length of the North Island. Then it will be spent on comforts for the wounded soldiers and sailors. The children do not realize that its length will only be measured on the map; they see actual pennies laid end to end, shining through bush and ti-tree, over stubborn hills, and Wellington's disgrace sticks in their throat. Wellington is only about up to Featherston, Auckland is right down to Cambridge. They are allowed to do anything to collect—black their faces and go round in wheelbarrows yelling, ‘Guy Fawkes, Guy,’ collect bottles from house to house, or wear red, white and blue cockades, and be appointed Ticket-Sellers, after an interview with a very grave gentleman who impresses on them that they must be careful not to lose the tickets.

Carly is too shy, though she has knitted two and a half balaclavas, and is now sobbing over the heel of her first khaki sock—trying to knit on four needles is terrible till you know how. But Eliza and Sandra make fine ticket collectors. In town, hurrying people sometimes brush them aside, or give beggarly pennies and threepences, but down on the wharves they are a huge success. The wharfies sit with backs against the tin sheds, their legs sprawled out, red handkerchiefs crusted round their heads. Some chew steadily on great hunks of bread and meat. Through cracks in the wharves you can see green water sparkling and sliding, and feel the whole wharf shake slightly as the piles move in the tide. Big horse-wagons lumber along, the wharves are all sprinkled with chaff and horse-dung. A man lives in an iron house above the wheeling, patient cranes. The wharfies pull half-crowns and florins out of their trousers, and fling them to Eliza and Sandra. ‘Here, little codger.’

One says, spitting clear into the sea, ‘What'll yer give me?’

‘A kiss,’ Eliza suggests, her brown hair blowing madly about her page 70 head. She feels light and strange, happy as the seagulls. ‘Aw ri,’ says the wharfie, and she kisses his cheek. A roar of laughter goes up.

‘Five bob for that one, Bill. Come along, be a sport.’ Bill fishes out two half-crowns and hands them over. Another wharfie corners Sandra.

‘What'll you do for ’arf-a-crown, kid?’

‘I'll sing Three Cheers for the Red, White and Blue,” offers Sandra, and pipes up, while the wharfies laugh and keep time. Afterwards she says to Eliza, ‘I wasn't going to kiss that one. I saw him blow his nose on the back of his hand.’

‘It's for the wounded soldiers and sailors.’

Sandra looks doubtful. ‘Anyhow,’ says Eliza, ‘I made £2/9/7d. How much did you make?’ They forget all about the wharfies, counting up Sandra's pennies and threepences and half-crowns.

Half-way through the war, Eliza became a poet. It happened in a white dinghy down at Island Bay, where Augusta used to take them in the summer evenings, Kitch in his push-chair. The boat looked safe and tired; there was a little dirty sea-water in its bottom, but not enough to count. She slid into it and curled up.

She heard the fishermen shouting, their oars splashed as they rowed out to drag the ends of their huge nets from the buoys. They were an Italian colony, who ate fried octopus and hung strings of garlic and red-gold onions in their huts. Once a hermit had lived on Island Bay's little Island. He was dead now.

But always… the sand had splayed out in fawn-coloured drifts, and the pale paraha bells had trembled their taut mauve silk, elastic to the touch, against the wind. It was a cold sea, hurt and tired.

The nets were in, it was nearly dark, and she knew Augusta would be buying three fish cheap. Tiny soles, shark, sea-urchins, fish like bursting kelp-pods, fish with flopping silver bodies and round red mouths.

Another voice mixed with the loud fishermen-voices, calling. She shut her ears to it, it would have broken the spell. At last, when a few pale stars sprinkled the sky, silver daisies on a stiff-standing dark blue taffetas gown, she clambered out of the boat, stiff all over. There was a crowd at the other end, and when they saw her everybody started at once. Her mother caught her by the wrist.

‘Do you know the Boy Scouts are out looking for you? Where have you been?’

‘I couldn't help it. I was writing a poem.’

Eliza felt that if the cliffs came tumbling down in a spoil of yellow sand, still she must say it. Men started calling back the Boys Scouts, page 71 who were enjoying themselves scuttling like crabs about the rocks; Eliza was wicked, selfish and ungrateful. When Augusta had finished apologizing for her, they went home.

Presently, Augusta was not cross any more, and they were all drinking macaroni soup at the house in Calver Street. Augusta said, ‘Now let's have this blessed poem.’ Eliza repeated it without a hitch. It rhymed ocean with motion and weather with feather.

Augusta said, ‘Humph… Not so bad. But you let me catch you hiding in boats again, that's all, my lady.’ With the same queer inconsistency she showed towards John's books, she bought Eliza an exercise book, and Eliza drew a palm tree and a Union Jack on the inside cover (somehow she always imagined John as sitting beneath a palm tree and a Union Jack, and besides, palm trees were easy to draw) and started writing poems with the regularity of a model Orpington mother laying eggs. Often when the poems were done she cried over them. John lay buried all over the world, in burning tropical sands, in Flanders mud, in English soil, on mountain-tops. Augusta sent him copies of the poems, but he didn't like them much, and wrote, ‘Eliza really ought to improve her handwriting.’ Mr Arden, the young curate of St Monica's, was enchanted, however, with ‘The Soldier's Babe’.

‘But this is delightful, Mrs Hannay. The others are childish—this has the true spirit of poetry.’ His long fingers were clever with the piano, and once at a church social, little girls in white cashmere frocks and open-work stockings sang Eliza's:

Hush thee to sleep, O gentle babe of mine,
Hush thee to sleep, beneath the southern vine;
Hush thee to sleep, holy and undefiled,
Hush thee to sleep, thou art a soldier's child.¹

There were several other verses, rhyming ‘Hun’ with ‘gun’ and ‘Verdun’. Sandra said, ‘There aren't any southern vines in Wellington, except in the Vaughan's greenhouse, and they're dirty Germans, so you oughtn't to put them into a poem about a soldier's babe. And besides, you don't do any hushing Kitch to sleep.’ But Eliza was happy, not so much in the concrete results—those horrifying little jingles with Union Jacks on their breasts and laurel-leaves in their hair—as in the mysterious sense of power and satisfaction that lay behind them; a daydream power, which slips through the eyes of all children, sometimes through the brooding eyes of meadow-beasts as well, but which is only rarely held and formulated. Eliza had no name page 72 for this feeling but ‘it’. Sometimes for weeks it would stay away, and she felt a petrifying conviction that it never would, never could come back again. She tried to bribe it by being incredibly good; then her mind swung to the opposite pole, and she thought, ‘Perhaps if I'm bad it will. I don't care, then, how bad I am.’ Then, without forcing or pleas, it was there, and with it peace; it was the first thing she had ever had that she could call truly her own.

Carly took Eliza's poetry hard. Once, at school, she went to the length of telling a fantastic lie about it.

‘Huh,’ she said scornfully, ‘Eliza doesn't write all that rosy-posy stuff. Mr Arden makes it up.’ Eliza stayed dumb with wounded vanity. After school, she cornered Carly alone.

‘That was a lie, Carly. Nobody makes up my poems for me.’

‘I don't care if they don't.’

This wasn't soft Carly. Eliza groped in holes and corners for an explanation.

‘Carly—

’ ‘I don't care. You can go home and tell Mother.’

‘I'm not going to tell on you. I know why you did it.’

‘Huh.’

Eliza proceeded gently, ‘You're in love with Mr Arden, aren't you, Carly?’

For a moment Carly's grey eyes looked as if they were going to pop out of her head.

‘I'm—I'm what?’

‘In love with Mr Arden.’

‘I'm not in love with anybody. I never was, and I never will be. You ought to be ashamed of yourself for talking about such things, Eliza Hannay, so there.’

‘Then why did you give him my poems?’

Water stood in Carly's eyes. She said, ‘Oh, you and your damn’ poems—don't be so smug about your damn’ poems,’ and raced away downhill, evidently forgetful that because she had said ‘Damn’—she said it twice—God might let their father be killed that night. Eliza stared after her with vague eyes. She was too much interested to be hurt any longer by Carly's lie, and besides, she felt now that she could write another poem. So she did, sitting among high dockplants in the empty section opposite the Willow Pattern Place. The dark-green leaves were stained foxy, and mottled with death, and the rusty spores, green at the base of their little octagons, shook down lightly on her face. She loved the feel of things, even hard, common things, like lumps of yellow clay and broken brick in the section, and the two page 73 halves of a white china cup somebody had thrown out. She had a game of trying to stare them out, and could look at them for a very long time without her eyes watering. And sometimes people changed in the same way. Some of the girls at school had boys; Eliza never did, but once she went up to the brickyards with Jim Burstle, just at sunset, and the red light poured over the reddish dusty bricks. All she could think was, ‘I am sitting in the brickyards with a boy.’ It didn't matter a bit who the boy was, or that neither of them said a word.

Then in a winter's morning Augusta was saying over and over again, ‘It's gone, I tell you it's gone. I've looked everywhere.’

‘Sit down, Mummy, you know you're always putting your bag in funny places,’ said Carly, who since Kitch arrived and became her nursling was faintly authoritative with Augusta.

‘I didn't lose it. I put it on my dressing-table last night. It was there when I went to sleep, and now it's vanished. Fourteen pounds—what shall I do? We'll all starve.’

‘It's sure to be somewhere.’ But it wasn't. The children hunted in old teapots, under the mattress in the cradle, even in the street drain, which the Collie boys eagerly poked with long sticks.

Sandra announced, round-eyed, ‘We had a burglar.’ Secretly, she was bubbling over with pleasure and importance; having a burglar was far more tangible in her mind than losing the £14. The children never had any money of their own but a halfpenny a week, paid on Saturdays, and if they did anything specially naughty, this was stopped. But Augusta, never helpless except in the hours of childbirth, sat half-collapsed in her rocking-chair, muttering, ‘Fourteen pounds—what shall we do, what shall we do?’

At school everybody was far more interested in the burglary than they had been in the war-baby, and Mr Duncan put a reward for information notice in the papers. But it was young Mr Arden who brought Augusta round. He wanted to take up a parish subscription for the Hannays; his kindliness got her right up to the last fence, and then she baulked. Her body became rigid, her mouth set.

‘No—no, thank you very much, Mr Arden. We'll manage.’

She managed, and the children never noticed the difference. But ten years later, at a vaudeville show, when a clairvoyant in a black velvet mask offered to tell the secrets of past, present and future, Augusta got up.

‘Where did my fourteen pounds go?’

The clairvoyant said that the Union Steamship Company got it.

‘Too big to search,’ said Augusta grimly, and sat down.

Carly, Sandra and Eliza were to go straight down to the hall, page 74 where the spraying-machine was, and when they had been sprayed, to hurry back without stopping to play with anyone. There wasn't any school; school was shut up, and many of the Duffel Street children were dead or dying, and Augusta, who was a V.A.D., said she did wish the Roman Catholics weren't so religious.

‘The moment they have a nose-bleed they start seeing Saints and angels, like a game of snakes and ladders, and have me out of my bed for nothing. If they spent half the time cleaning their houses on earth as they do white-washing their souls for the Hereafter they'd have more chance when they really are ill. I haven't had my sleep for the past four nights.’

But though Augusta grumbled a little, she was in her element, and her red hair won back its old defiance, marching with the red-lettered V.A.D. badge on her arm. Mr Duncan was nearly dead. He had broken into the Boseley house, and found old Mr Boseley (according to Sylvia Rainer) stiff as a board and black all over, and stopped on to nurse Mrs Boseley and her son, even after he caught the influenza himself. Then he had staggered out and collapsed near the Rainer gate, and Mrs Rainer was nursing him, for which Eliza would once have envied her almost to death. But now the silent streets and ugly little match-box houses looked so deserted that, in a negative way, they were exciting. They were a dusty mouth that had opened and swallowed everything up.…

The formalin with which they were sprayed smelt sweet-sticky, clinging in vaporous, fine-beaded mists to skin and hair. The old people who owned the Willow Pattern Place had died of the ’flu, and their ducks paddled about, dirty white breasts and yellow bills on the weedy pond. A line in a poem she had read came into her mind:

Toy Town is covered up with weeds.

In the real poem it was ‘Troy Town’, and went on beautifully to tell of the Atlanteans; but she liked ‘Toy Town’ better. The houses were so little, and the empty sunlight straggled and bloomed over them, itself like a great golden weed.

Half-way down Calver Street the Silly Boy still stood, swaying and smiling. Eliza thought, if all the confetti of the wrong Armistice Day, when the grown-ups went mad, came down on his head, rose and blue and little bits of rainbow green, still he wouldn't have cared.

They were meeting Daddy at the wharf; and after hours in a crowd tight-packed, John was off the gangway; John, thinner and a little browner, was kissing them all, his rough hairy khaki brushing page 75 against faces and hands. From Cape Town he had sent them presents—silver leaves, bright hankies, and for Carly a crocodilite brooch in a golden filigree setting, though the filigree soon tarnished, proving it was not real gold. But Carly thought then that she might love him, after all, and had gone through spells of remorse like toothache. They took a taxi going home, the first they had ever had. Carly stood up, wanting to watch the scattered world of khaki clothes and crying pink faces. He grabbed her by the arm, and jerked her back to the seat.

‘Sit down, can't you, sit down? What do you think you're doing?

’ Carly thought, ‘I still don't properly love him, and he doesn't love me.’

The real end of the war happened up in the little grey hills behind the waterworks. It was an easy walk from Calver Street, and sometimes the boys used to fly kites there on Sundays. The Hannays found and played in an enclosed space, planted like a garden with shrubs. Dark trees with sticky pink flowers hived multitudes of slumbrous bees. At first Carly was nervous of the trees, because they might meet a man or a cow—cows nowadays seemed to her just as bad as men; but it turned out a reliable place, and they were sitting cross-legged under the pink-flowered shrubs when the music began.

Carly said, ‘It must be the wires,’ and they listened intently. But there weren't any wires, no fine spider-web catching in these hills; and besides, the music was far too large for them. It seemed to swell out of the ground, out of a magically opened doorway in the hillside; deep and vibrant it talked. Afterwards Eliza thought, ‘It was like a windharp,’ though she had never heard one. The low hills vibrated gently, and none of them could say how long it lasted. Dying traveller's joy lay spun on the bushes, masses of gauzy filaments. The children dropped their pine-cones, and stared at one another. Their faces were round and pale, like the puff-balls of blossom they used to call wild clocks. Odd little things, they looked, suddenly raught away from the world. When the music trembled no more and they could catch no least echo of it, they went down over the hills to Eliza's Toy Town.