‘Soup,’ said Miss Ranskill. ‘Yes, I should like some soup. After that I’ll have a sleep.’
Most of her days as well as nights were spent in sleeping: there was so much to be made up. In the intervals between sleeping and dozing she ate and asked occasional questions whose answers she digested slowly. There was a good deal of digesting to be done. Geography and history were so curiously changed and muddled. Germany had removed its neighbours’ landmarks and turned the whole of Europe into No-man’s land. Friendly Italy had become foe; Russia, so often cartooned, was the saviour of civilisation, and France was divided against herself.
The wireless made her head ache, besides, she could not follow the news, and remarked, after her first attempt, that she felt like a kindergarten child who had been jumped into the sixth form of a high school.
She did not ask many questions about England. It would, she decided, as there had been no invasion, be very much as it had been in the last war, anxious and busy. But her sister, a permanency if ever there was one, would still be doing the church flowers and having servant difficulties. Miss Moxon and Miss Grant (two other permanancies) would still be quarrelling under the roof they had shared for twenty-five, no, for twenty-eight years now. The village children would have grown, the tiny ones plumping up and the taller ones pulling out.
She never thought of considering whether there would be any change in herself: there is not much difference in age between thirty-nine and forty-three. No, everything would be pretty much the same in the village when she, Nona Ranskill, came back, with a story to tell that would make tea-party gossip for week after week.
She was in the state known to all of us in some degree when the train has steamed out of the station – not quite here and yet not there either, with all the pictures of the destination as bright in the mind as coloured postcards.
Yet, some urgency of mind told her that though her own particular pictures might keep their brightness for a week or so after her arrival, they would soon fade or be superimposed upon.
‘But just for a little,’ drowsed Miss Ranskill, ‘just for a little, early morning tea and hot baths and electric light switches and armchairs and roses. All so easy, getting into a train and going where you want to, and listening to the wind blowing outside and the rain on the window-panes, and seeing the lights blazing from the windows when you come home from a walk.’
One morning she remarked, ‘It’s very queer to be so safe.’
‘A convoy,’ replied Commander Wrekin. ‘A convoy isn’t everybody’s idea of safety, you know. I’d meant to have a chat about that, but I didn’t want to worry you after the shaking-up you’ve had.’
‘Oh! submarines!’ said Miss Ranskill, in a voice that might have dismissed a mouse. ‘I don’t mind them. It was being alone on an empty sea that I minded. One can get used to most things, but not to that.’
She was gradually getting used to the idea of freedom and plenty again, and, as mind and body were fed, desire grew. She longed not for one knife but for twenty, for dozens of silk stockings and abundance of clothes. She would have four years’ income to spend.
It was not until they were two days offshore that she heard their destination was Hartmouth. Hartmouth? What did she know about Hartmouth? She shook her memory and saw a sheet of blue notepaper with a stamped address – Hillrise, Newton Road, Hartmouth. Tel. Hartmouth 258, looked again at the tight precise little handwriting on envelopes that reached her three or four times a year. The letters they carried brought news of the tea-parties, ‘marvellous bargains’ and ‘wonderful’ holidays of ‘yours ever, Marjorie Mallison (Mottram).’
Yes, Marjorie, whose india-rubber she had shared, whose pencils she had chewed, lived at Hartmouth and was married to a doctor. Stodgy-legged, smooth-haired, rabbit-mouthed Marjorie would be glad to see her, would put her up until she could buy a trunk and a suitcase and fill them both. She would put up Edith too, if her sister came to welcome her.
She would telephone to Marjorie as soon as she was ashore and then she would take a taxi to Newton Road.
Marjorie, who had won the ‘Special Prize’ for ‘being the most helpful alike to staff and pupils’, whose reports, lacking the venom that had brightened Nona Ranskill’s, were tributes to sterling and stodgy character – very good, tries hard, good careful work, an excellent term and (eulogy from the Head Mistress) Marjorie sets the tone of the school and is a first-class influence – would be the very person to help.
That was all settled then. Miss Ranskill packed up her mind for the night, pulled down the sleeves of the First Lieutenant’s pyjamas, knocked her head against the edge of his bunk and turned over to sleep.
Visions of Marjorie kept interrupting, echoes of Marjorie’s voice jogged her to wakefulness. It had been rather a throaty voice.
‘I say,’ (this on the occasion of her first Head Girl speech to the sixth form) ‘I say, this isn’t going to be a pie-jaw or anything, but I do sort of feel it’s up to all of us to make this a frightfully specially good term because of that new school that’s come to the Towers. I mean, we mustn’t go ragging about in crocodile or anything. Personally, I think it would be a frightfully good idea if we were to march in step for the first half mile, or anyway till we’re through the village. I know it’ll be a bit of a fag but I do think it’s up to us to show this ghastly new school that St Catherine’s is the school. We’ll have to challenge their eleven next week and fix up a match, and we simply must win it. But anyway, I do think it would be a jolly good idea if we were to begin by marching in croc.: Hands up everyone who agrees…. Wake up, Nona…. Nona, everyone else has put their hands up. Aren’t you going to vote?’
And back through the years, surviving the death and burial of the Carpenter and threat of starvation at sea, Nona Ranskill’s answer came echoing back to her:
‘Well, I don’t see why we should suddenly start marching about just to show off to a new school.’
‘But it isn’t showing off. I mean, they must jolly well know that St Cat’s is the best school. It’s only just keeping up our prestige sort of. I mean, I don’t want to pie-jaw, but there are some things one just can’t explain. I do think that marching would sort of show. Hands up again everybody…. Nona!’
‘But I don’t see why their school shouldn’t be the best to them. P’raps they’ll march too: then we’ll want a band. Besides, I don’t see why we should call St Catherine’s the best school just because we were sent to it.’
‘Nona!’
‘Well, I don’t. It’s silly!’
Thereafter, Marjorie, perched on the edge of the row of wash-basins in the sixth form cloakroom, had pleaded confusedly to Nona to ‘back up St Cat’s’, had mingled the death of Nelson with dinner-jackets on shikari, linked the school song, ‘Forty Years On’ (taken with no sense of humour from Harrow) with ‘Rule, Britannia’ and ‘God Save the King’, and waved (metaphorically) a new National Flag composed partly of the Union Jack and, more largely, of the school badge on whose shield-shaped background a Catherine Wheel, a portcullis and the legend Honour before Honours were embroidered, until Nona, more embarrassed than convinced, muttered that she wouldn’t mind marching so much if she didn’t always start off with the wrong foot.
Marjorie’s triumphant ‘I knew you’d come round. I knew you were only ragging, you chump,’ ended the conversation.