The Golden Lion Read online

  She and Aunt Maimie worked hard for the Cause. War work at the Babies’ Centre in Middlesbrough; childcare, sewing, knitting. In the evenings Uncle Eric was often busy on committees: Belgian Relief or the North Riding Distress Fund. Ida organized sewing parties with shirts and pyjamas already cut out.

  James, Ida, Dick, Peter, Jenny. Perhaps the easiest was Ida (robustly helpful, explaining in her brisk, jolly way, ‘This is how we do things here. You’ll soon get used to it …’) The kindest was Dick. Dick would be joining the RFC, the Royal Flying Corps, as soon as he became eighteen, then the family would have him to worry about too. As she had Rocco and Gaetano. Dear Dick – who exasperated Uncle Eric. Too dreamy, too intense. He was clever with his hands and understood the technicalities of work at the foundry – but he could not charm like James.

  Although she had seen James only once, she felt she knew him almost as well as she did the others. She shared in his letters from France: James, the Graingers’ pride and joy, who had come on leave in November and been seen to be even more fine-looking than in the photographs. Although such a short time at home, he’d been happy to talk with his father about the Foundry and its problems. He couldn’t wait for the guns to stop, he said, so that he could be part of it again.

  And then there was Jenny, difficult Jenny, appealing always to Aunt Dulcie when she was in trouble (‘I wish Aunt Dulcie was my mother,’ was her constant cry). Jenny had her father’s eyebrows, bushy and growing close together, above green eyes. She had too the clean-cut family cheekbones, so marked in Aunt Dulcie.

  Jenny disliked Maria. Jenny, watching her at meals, wearing her little secret smile as if she knew something Maria didn’t. (She did of course. She knew that she belonged here.) Jenny, hiding her school exercise book: ‘You were trying to look, weren’t you? You can’t pinch my school work, you have to do it by yourself.’

  ‘I don’t want your stupid work,’ Maria had cried (was it to be the Lusy all over again?) Jenny peering over her shoulder:

  ‘If that’s meant to be a map of Italy, you’ve got it wrong. Sicily’s only little. Look, you’ve made it as big as Spain –’

  ‘It is as big as Spain!’ Tears of rage and frustration welled up, while Jenny smiled the smile that turned up the corners of her mouth, narrowing her eyes to dangerous slits. Too late Maria thought of a reply:

  ‘It’s art, Jenny. You may be crazy enough to think it’s geography, but it’s art. I can do it just any way I like.’

  It had been in September she began at the Grammar School in Albert Road. The boys and girls were in different wings. She had been strange and lost, with only a mocking Jenny for support. The other girls had been told about her history. They were surprisingly kind. Because she was a Catholic child, Uncle Eric had to get a dispensation from the Bishop for her to attend a Protestant school. Every Sunday when the Graingers attended St Hilda’s, she was taken to Mass by an Irish family, the Mulligans. When they were in Thackton, Aunt Dulcie’s friend, Miss Dennison, took her by motor to the church in Egton – a village which, Miss Dennison explained, had stayed Catholic since Penal times.

  The Dennisons’ house, Park Villa, was on the road leading into Thackton-le-Moors from Moorgarth where the Graingers lived. Eleanor Dennison, tall, perhaps a little severe, had smooth brown hair up in a bun, and strong features in a long face. She was kind, inviting Maria to breakfast after Mass. Her mother, who went with them, frightened Maria. Her voice although quiet, was like someone spitting needles.

  Miss Dennison kept two beehives at Park Villa and last July she’d allowed Maria to help her with taking off the first frames of honey. In August they had gone together to take the bees out on to moorland, to gather heather honey. Miss Dennison talked to her of Italy and Italian art, about which Maria knew nothing.

  Thackton. How she loved it. The first time arriving at the small station in darkness. The porter with the lantern calling, ‘Thackton-le-Moors, Thackton-le-Moors.’ The gig up to Moorgarth. Elsie Thackeray, the housekeeper, waiting to meet them. The tureen of bacon and pea soup, the freshly baked bread. The feeling of home. Much more than Middlesbrough, Thackton was to be her home.

  Thackton-le-Moors was in Eskdale, named after the river Esk. The dales or valleys of Yorkshire ran from north to south like the fingers of a hand, between the high moorland ridges. You could tell which way you were going, Dick said, by the rain or wind on your cheek. There was plenty of rain and wind.

  Last summer she’d been with Ida and Miss Dennison, gathering sphagnum moss on the moors. It was used for dressing wounds in hospital where it could help avoid the dreaded gas gangrene. In the late summer they’d picked bilberries – envying the man who used a bilberry-gatherer like a giant comb, raking up an hour’s work in one swoop.

  Moorgarth. The stone farmhouse which stood on the road leading out of Thackton towards the coast had once been a silk mill. But a wall and gateway outside, and the old fireplace built into the foundations of the farmhouse were all that remained of it now. The farmhouse door was reached by walking round into the courtyard which, with its worn flags, was built in the shape of an L. The bedroom she shared with Ida, Jenny and Aunt Dulcie, looked out on to partly cultivated land – a regular pattern, crisscrossed with fields, green or gold. Farmsteads were dotted about. Clumps of trees followed the river Esk as it meandered. And the train from Middlesbrough to Whitby could be watched, puffing white in the sunlight but at night a toy train, just visible by its dimly lit wartime carriages (a section of line had been taken up to contribute metal to the war effort). Behind all that, high up, was moorland and the long flat-topped ridge known as Thackton Rigg, with its dark patches of dead burned heather, its path winding over, out of sight. Last summer she had watched the colours changing, from green to amethyst, to purple, to russet.

  The stables and cattle sheds were filled with bicycles and games except for the one in which Dick kept his cream mare, Eulalia. (He wanted her to ride but she was frightened.) Moorgarth wasn’t farmed but the Graingers had the ancient right to graze eight sheep on the land attached. Although there were none there, there were plenty in the village itself. Strolling up the main street, black-faced and solid. So heavy and humorous beside the lean biblical sheep of her childhood.

  The sheep of Monteleone, the mountains of Sicily. And Minicu. She did not often think of Minicu these days. She kept him buried with lots of other frightening memories. It was enough to mourn Mamma and the Ricciardis.

  But some of it was unwittingly dug up through Dick’s kindness. He had brought her a pile of books from his childhood. She hadn’t bothered much with the pirates and Indian mutineers (just as she hadn’t with Ida’s schoolgirl heroines who never cheated, while taking the blame for those who did) but had fallen eagerly upon the volumes of fairy tales. It was in one of these she’d come upon The Golden Lion. Although some details were different, it was Za Rosetta’s story all right. Translated now from the German, it had come a long way. When with delight she pointed it out to Dick, he said, his eyes lighting up:

  ‘Oh, but that was quite one of my favourites – I used to pretend I was the youngest son hiding inside the Lion … Once I even had a nightmare about it and wouldn’t be in a room with a closed door. I was a great nuisance as a child.’

  ‘It isn’t frightening,’ she said, ‘but it could be. I used to mix up the Golden Lion with a real person who –’ She broke off.

  The Lion. We don’t think of him. And we never speak of him. Kindly man with large hands, friendly pouches beneath his eyes, a head of hair like a lion’s mane. Mamma: ‘On your knees for his blessing. Down, Maria, down …’ (‘The Lion has a heart of stone. Where is Minicu? Ask the vultures …’)

  Dick’s kindness, thoughtfulness. Trimmer had been his idea, a present for her first Christmas. The family bulldogs, Pepper and Salt, were friendly but belonged to everyone. Dick had suggested a spaniel puppy, golden, from a litter which Tom Reeves had just bred (Tom was the Dennisons’ gardener and the youngest of five boys. Three of his b
rothers had been killed already.) It was Uncle Eric who had christened the puppy. ‘Why Trimmer?’ she’d asked.

  ‘He who runs with the hare and hunts with the hounds,’ Uncle Eric told her. ‘A trimmer. But don’t bother your dear little head with that.’

  How she loved Trimmer. Here at Linthorpe Road where she had a room of her own, no one knew that he slept tucked up in her bed (at Moorgarth where she shared a bed with Ida, he would howl at intervals all through the night). She buried her face now in his coat, dried her tears with the blue bow, and kicked the pianola stool, hard.

  That’s for Peter, she thought.

  The door opened, quietly. It wasn’t Peter back. It was Aunt Dulcie. Tears ran down her face. She held a paper in her hand.

  ‘I was looking for – Maria dear, where is everybody? I – you see, perhaps I shouldn’t have opened this. But I guessed. I met the telegraph boy as I came up the drive.’

  Maria stood very still, Trimmer in her arms. Aunt Dulcie said, mouth trembling, tears falling:

  ‘I shall have to tell his mother. And Eric, Mr Grainger … It must be I who tell him. You see, Maria dear, James has been killed.’

  2

  At first Dick thought it was the wind in the ‘plane’s rigging. Then he heard the crackle of flames, the whipping, the roar. Petrol. Smoke, heat: orange heat. This is the Orange Death, we call it the Orange Death. A figure, a man, stands up in the ‘plane, flailing the air. The rush of air fans the flames, but he stands up and beats them. And all the while the plane is going down. Down, down. A spiral. A roaring furnace. The flames roared in his ears. Fire sizzled flesh. Mouth twisted, wordlessly. Seconds that are minutes that are hours. Oh God, let me die.

  ‘You were screaming in your sleep again,’ Rattler told him.

  ‘I’d a nightmare. The usual.’

  ‘If you’re like this now, how’ll you be in France? Littlewood’s brother’s been out three months. He says –’

  ‘Cut it, Rattler –’

  ‘Bloody lucky, those training Avros yesterday, they didn’t catch fire – clashing in mid-air like that. What a sodding way to go.’

  ‘Clear out, would you?’

  He was sorry a moment later. But neither Rattler nor any of the others would expect an apology. They were a good-humoured lot – as was Dick most of the time. Lieutenant Richard Grainger RFC. There was a great deal to enjoy in flying. And it was smart and exciting to be a ‘birdman’, about, this summer of 1917, to be posted to France. Yet, these fears. Shot down in flames. Perhaps, as he suspected, everyone else had them secretly? When the nightmares returned again and again, he would ask himself: How did I come to be here? Why?

  The Lusitania. He had been sixteen when she was torpedoed. The Christmas before, 1914, he had left school to work in the foundry. In the spring of 1915 he became very ill: double pneumonia. Dad sent him to Thackton, with just Ida and the housekeeper Elsie for company, to convalesce. Riding, eating, walking, resting. One day in early May he’d been on his way back to Moorgarth when a despatch rider, goggled, helmeted, stepped off his Douglas cycle in the village:

  ‘Had you heard, the Germans have sunk the Lusitania? The bastards.’

  Hurrying back to Ida, then running down with her to rouse Mrs Clarkson at the post office. Putting a call through to Middlesbrough and hearing there was no news yet of survivors. Then going back, not to Moorgarth, but to the Dennisons where there was a telephone (and a plainly shocked Eleanor, caring, it seemed, as much as if it were her own father). The call came at eight the next morning. Aunt Dulcie’s voice: Dad was safe. Yes, it was certain – the telegram had come directly from him. She was making the call because Mother was too upset. Mother had had a fainting fit on hearing the news.

  The day before going back to Middlesbrough to welcome Father home, he went for a last ride. He could see from his window his cream mare, Eulalia, grazing. As he crossed the yard, her nose, eager and questing, came over the wall. She arched her head in anticipation as he produced from his pocket a wizened apple. She ate it, yellow teeth bared. Her cream-coloured coat was caked with mud where she had rolled in it: pale curly mane matted, folded back on itself.

  Caressing her, ‘My Eulalia,’ vowing yet again ‘You shan’t be cannon fodder,’ he felt himself unsettled, like the weather. Part of the general anger. Yesterday old Mr Outhwaite in the chandler’s had said, ‘There’s not a German in England’ll sleep safe in his bed tonight.’ Riots in Liverpool and Hull. More Germans interned, rushed to the Isle of Man. ‘A fine grown lad,’ the words hung in the air. ‘A fine grown lad like you, you’ll be wanting to go.’

  He didn’t. Although had he wished, he could have passed for seventeen, even eighteen. Nor was he really indispensable in the firm yet. He knew quite a lot technically and would soon know a lot more, but when the time came the firm would manage well enough, would help the war effort, without him. He thought of Dad’s journey to the States (how successful, they would be hearing from him); the acid-resisting bearings, Dad’s own invention, which had so interested Packard. Whatever the outcome (and surely it would mean increased production?) they could manage without him. James was the greater loss. James, while not eager to fight, had been full of a sense of duty.

  Running his fingers through Eulalia’s knotted mane, Dick thought: I could not bear to be a soldier. An officer, leading his men out of the trench, first and fearless.

  The mood followed him throughout the ride. As he came up on to Thackton Rigg, he stopped for a while. Listening. Down in the valley a dog barked. Then he heard a skylark sing, saw the bird begin its ascent. He leaned forward a little in the saddle: the lark was singing still, spiralling now, higher, higher, until, although he strained, he could see it no longer.

  Air, sky, the natural habitat of birds. What must it be like alone up there? But of course, he thought suddenly, I don’t need to be a soldier, don’t need to live underground. Life of a mole, sniped at, gored by bayonets, buried at any moment by an explosion. I shall fly, he thought. When the time comes, I shall fly. Up, up, into the sun. Wings opening into the sun. A skylark.

  The next evening (could it be only a day since he’d watched the lark ascending?) he stood with Ida and Aunt Dulcie beneath the glazed arched roof of Middlesbrough station, watching anxiously for the familiar figure, bushy eyebrows, assured stride, walking the length of the platform. And then … But what was this? He had expected Dad to be differently, perhaps oddly dressed – after all he had lost everything. But that Dad wouldn’t be alone … Yet here he was, unlikely check coat and, holding tight his hand, a small, plump, dark girl, in a plaid coat-dress and with a scarlet bow in her hair.

  Maria. Maria Verzotto. About to alter all their lives. Her voice: strange, partly American, partly something else. Her quaint way of speech, her boldness, followed by attacks of painful shyness when she would attempt to hide in Dad’s coat. She was to call Dad ‘Uncle Eric’, but often she forgot and would say just, ‘Mister. Hey, mister …’

  She had lost not only, tragically, her mother, but also the rich Americans who had semi-adopted her. She was to stay in Middlesbrough with them until her future could be decided. Aunt Dulcie took her to Wilson’s the draper’s to kit her out. At Thackton two weeks later, Eleanor Dennison’s help was asked. Like her, Maria was a Roman Catholic.

  Maria. Better not to remember how some of them hadn’t liked her. Jenny’s jealousy. Peter’s sulks. Mother was difficult too. ‘I trust I’m not expected to put myself out for – that,’ she had said forbiddingly, within earshot of Maria. ‘Let Dulcie bother.’

  Dick had liked her at once. It was he who’d shown her the player-piano (the ragtime rolls, the gramophone records so lovingly bought by Dad in New York, at the bottom of the sea now). Those first few weeks, still lost and bewildered, she’d seemed her most contented when she sat pedalling, occasionally singing along.

  Gradually after her arrival life had returned to normal, wartime normal. He had gone back to work at the foundry. No one spoke of his enlisting. Rig
htly they worried instead about James who, further cause of family pride, was awarded the MC after the battle of Loos in September. In the autumn he came home on a fortnight’s leave. Handsome, confident, and tired. Tiredness gave him a distinguished air, as did the no longer new Sam Browne and the soft cap, battered now, worn carelessly at an angle. Frequent fast, nervous cigarette-smoking. He refused a cigar from Dad the first evening although he accepted a brandy and three whiskies. At the foundry he walked round the floor with Dad, Dick in tow, and asked the right questions.

  Where do I fit in? Dick had thought then. In the middle – Mother’s least favourite son. Dad’s – what? Not a favourite there. It was James the firstborn, the natural inheritor, who effortlessly did everything right. ‘My son, James.’ Who could forget Dad’s face when he presented James to anyone? And then, five months after that last leave, he had been killed. Within hours, Dick had seen his mantle falling, slipping easily on to Peter’s shoulders. A distressed Peter who declared, uneasily emotional, voice breaking, ‘If it wasn’t for school, I’d step in tomorrow … I’ll make the works what he would have done – you wait and see.’ And then, fiery red, he had burst out sobbing and left the room.

  Dick, struggling with emotions that wouldn’t go into words, had felt his face stiffen, his lips swollen and dry. (James, running out from the trench, shot like a fox who leaves his lair? or buried underground in a shower of dust and metal?) All he could do was blurt out:

  ‘Did they – will they tell us how he died?’

  Silence.

  ‘Dick,’ Aunt Dulcie said reprovingly. ‘Dick. In front of your mother …’

  He applied to join the Royal Flying Corps just before his eighteenth birthday. The interview went well and he expected to go within a week or two so that he could begin his new life before courage cooled. But he heard nothing till the early cold days of October, when he was sent for to go south to Stamford, in Lincolnshire. At first it hadn’t been too bad. Excitement and comradeship. That perhaps was what he’d been missing since leaving school. Walking with, or without, father on the foundry floor, had been no substitute for shared experiences. Now it was new, quickly-made friends. Judson, Littlewood, Rattler, Price-Davies, Snelgrove, Osborne. Same problems, excitements, joys and sorrows. Same fears.