The Monkey Puzzle Tree Read online

  Mrs. Farrell came along the narrow passage from the back room into the hallway, pushing a fiery wisp of hair off her face with her wrist, a small, dark green book in her fingers. She moved as if underwater, slowly and gracefully.

  “Hello, Gillian. I’m very pleased to meet you.” Her voice was slow and lovely too, like the rest of her. Her eyes were long and grey, and her smile lit up the hall. A knight would gladly slay a dragon for her, Gillian thought.

  “Mama! They were picking on me after school again today!” With a bang of the back door, a dark-haired boy, about six years old, rushed sobbing through the house. “They said to go back where I came from.”

  His mother knelt down and put her arms around him. “Oh, Francis, darling, don’t cry. It’ll get better.”

  “You said that yesterday. It’s getting worse, not better! I hate it here in Wales, Mama! I want to go back where I came from. I want to go home to Dublin!” He looked tearfully around his mother at Gillian. “Hey, that’s Tommy’s sister! He’s in my class at school. He’s nice.”

  Mrs. Farrell stood up. “There you are, you see, darling boy. Not all of them are mean. You’ll have a better day tomorrow.” Something was tugging her skirt back against the length of her legs. She put a hand behind her. “Come and say hello to Gillian, Bridie. She’s Vanna’s friend.” The little dark-haired girl Gillian had seen at the grocer’s edged, scowling, into sight, still holding onto the brown serge skirt with one hand, and clutching the ragged blue jersey of the even smaller child with the other.

  “This is Patrick.” His mother smoothed his straight, red-gold hair. “He’s two and a half, aren’t you, darling?” Patrick beamed up at Gillian as a wail came from the back of the house, and Mrs. Farrell floated away, followed by the three younger children, Francis whining, “I’m so hungry, Mama!” as they disappeared into the back room. Gillian could not understand that. Despite the rationing, she and Tommy never went really hungry. There was just not enough food here to go round, she supposed.

  “There’s an awful lot of you, isn’t there?” she said.

  Vanna fiddled with the elastic band on the end of a plait. “How many are you?”

  “Just me and Tommy. We want to go to go home too, like your brother. We’re only living with our grandma and grandpa until the war ends, or even before, maybe. We go home on weekends sometimes.” Annoyed, Gillian remembered how the last time they had been there, she had found Gladys in the kitchen with Mrs. Jones, smirking because she had been allowed back home for good, and they had not. “And then we’re going back to Swansea to live with Mummy and Daddy again all the time. Where’s your home?”

  “Not here anyway! We’re only here until Dada makes enough money at the steel works, and then we’re going back home to Dublin.”

  “Vanna, my lovely girl, will you watch Kathleen for me? I have to change Patrick’s trousers.” Mrs. Farrell passed them, carrying the little boy who waved bye-bye to Gillian over his mother’s shoulder, looking pleased with himself. Tommy would never have got away with wetting his pants at that age, she thought.

  The baby’s blue eyes, fringed with long black lashes, stared up at Gillian from the fastness of her cradle in the back room until her mouth pulled down, and she began to cry again.

  “I’ve got to mind her for a minute. Will you stay, Gillian?”

  Gillian hesitated. She should not have been in what her grandmother would have called ‘a den of iniquity’ anyway, and, interesting as Vanna’s home was, with those piles of books standing around on the floor, it did not look as if there would be much playing.

  “Sorry, I’ve got to go.”

  She ran all the way back to her grandparents’ house with its flowery curtains, soft chairs, and shining furniture. A mouthwatering smell came from the kitchen of cawl, the soup her grandmother was making from neck of mutton and vegetables from the garden.

  “You took your time coming home from school.” Her grandmother looked at her over her glasses as she seasoned the soup. “I hope you weren’t playing with that little Irish girl.”

  “No, I didn’t play with her.” Gillian chose not to go into details. “Grandma, why won’t you let me be friends with Vanna? I really like her.”

  “No, Gillian. I don’t want you to have anything to do with her, and neither does your grandfather. Those people worship idols.” Her grandmother tasted the soup with a wooden spoon before briskly removing her floral apron.

  “But they worship Jesus, Grandma, like us.” Gillian had seen a carving of Jesus on the cross in the Farrells’ back room, as well as a picture of him wearing a crown of giant thorns and pointing to his bleeding heart. There was a lovely little statue of the Virgin Mary, too, up on a shelf with candles.

  “They don’t worship Him in the right way, Gillian, and I’m telling you again, I don’t want you to have anything more to do with her. D’you hear me now?” She pointed the spoon at Gillian, quite fiercely for her.

  “But Grandma, everyone’s mean to them. I’m the only girl who’ll talk to Vanna, and the big boys are nasty to Francis.”

  “Yes they are!” Tommy charged in, grabbing a Welshcake. “They pull down his trousers.”

  “He’s only six, Grandma, like Tommy.” Gillian put her head on one side and looked up at her grandmother. “Didn’t Jesus say to suffer the little children, and to love our neighbours? And they’re five little children, and they are sort of our neighbours, aren’t they? Would Jesus say I mustn’t be friends with her? Would he, Grandma?”

  “That’s enough arguing, Gillian. You’re not to play with her, and that’s that. Go and get me some more rosemary from the bush and help me lay the table now, there’s a good girl. We have to be quick tonight because Grandpa and I are going to a meeting at the Apostolic Hall.”

  Gillian put out the soup bowls and spoons, brooding. She and Tommy had been to one of those meetings in the shack that was the Apostolic Hall. She remembered how the rain drummed on the corrugated iron roof as if trying to drown out the cries of the congregation: “O Dew annwyl! Dear Lord! Forgive me, Jesus!” they shouted, with scatterings of “Amen!” and “Allelewlia!” which she knew was not how you were supposed to say it. Tommy, overcome by the warmth, fell asleep, leaning against Grandpa, but Gillian kept her eyes open to watch.

  After an endless sermon pleading with people to repent and be saved, some people went up to the front and announced that they had taken Jesus into their hearts. Others stood up and begged Him, in tears, to take them into His, there and then. One woman fell down, thrashing about and moaning, and a whiskery old man with pink, watery eyes and breath like bad meat turned around and whispered to Gillian, “Have you found Jesus, little girl?” to which she had thought it best to whisper back, “Yes, thank you.” She had been very glad when her father later ruled that they were not to go there again.

  Worrying about her friendship with Vanna as she put out the bread plates, she wondered if she should, after all, try asking Jesus what to do, as her grandmother was always telling her she should. In the end she decided there was not much point. She had rather gone off Jesus anyway. God was another matter perhaps, more for grown-ups, but wasn’t Jesus supposed to be the little children’s friend and protector? There’s a friend for little children,/Above the bright blue sky, and all that, but he had not protected her from Angus, even though she had prayed to him with all her might to make her invisible. Nor had he got her and Tommy home again, away from the Macphersons’, or if he had, he had taken his time about it. And what was he doing about the Farrell children?

  This was not the first time she had had her doubts about him, either. At Eastertime, while the congregation moaned,

  We do not know, we cannot tell,

  What pains he had to bear,

  We only know it was for us

  He hung and suffered there.

  she had wondered why, since she, personally, would never, ever, have as
ked Jesus to do such a thing, she was supposed to feel guilty. Why would he want her to?

  She banged a plate of bread down on the table. She would go on seeing Vanna. Her grandmother just did not need to know.

  At school the next day, the two girls studied the hole left by a stone falling out of the wall in a corner of the girls’ yard. About ten inches each way, it made a perfect little room, just waiting to be set up. Watched from across the yard by a couple of sniggering girls from the next class up, they spent the morning break laying down a carpet of moss, picked off the wall.

  After the dinner break, Gillian came back with a fire-place: a pillbox filled with chunky jet beads from her grandmother’s button collection, interspersed with scarlet cellophane flames cut from a sweet-wrapper. Vanna had brought an outsized matchbox, filled with cotton wool. Covered with a square of gold damask from Gillian’s grandmother’s scrap bag, it made a perfect bed. Her other contribution had been a tiny naked china baby, which she said had come out of a Christmas cracker.

  They swaddled the baby in cotton wool, tucked it into a cradle made from half a chestnut shell, and placed it by the fire. Vanna clapped her hands together, a wide smile on her thin, freckled face. “This is somebody’s home! Let’s get some more stuff and make it really beautiful!”

  At Vanna’s house, after school, they found Mrs. Farrell reading in an armchair. Patrick was playing with blocks, while Bridie drew letters on her slate and the baby slept in her cradle. Gillian suppressed a memory of her grandmother’s friend, Mrs. Thomas-the-Post-Office, saying “That woman just sits around reading like a lady, when she should be scrubbing her filthy house.”

  Beside Mrs. Farrell, on a rough wooden box covered with a lace cloth, was a cup and saucer with a pattern of clover leaves scattered on a cream background, so delicate you could almost see through the cup. It was even finer than Gillian’s grandmother’s best tea-set, the one with yellow butterflies for handles.

  “Mama, we found a hole in the wall and we’re making it into a home!” Vanna opened her eyes wide and spread out her hands in a ‘ta-da!’ gesture.

  Mrs. Farrell put down her book and looked at them with her slow smile. “Isn’t that a fine thing then,” she said, “to make a home out of a hole in the wall! Tell me about it.”

  The girls described the carpet, and the bed, and the fire. “And we’ve got a cradle!” Gillian told her. “With a beautiful little china baby in it that Vanna got from a Christmas cracker.”

  The shout of the old rag and bone man rose up out on the street. “Rah-BO!”

  “We never have crackers.” Mrs. Farrell said. She raised her eyebrows and looked at Vanna who was twisting the toe of her sandal into a hole in the carpet. “Evangeline, did you take the baby Jesus from the box with the crèche?”

  Vanna turned crimson. “I was going to put him back, Mama. I just wanted to see what it looked like to have a baby in the cradle.”

  “Well then, you run straight back to school and fetch it. Quickly now!”

  As Vanna dashed off, Mrs. Farrell held out her hand to Gillian. “Stay here with me, will you, Gillian. We can have a chat.”

  Gillian sat on a three-legged wooden stool beside Mrs. Farrell, and glanced around at the shabby bits of furniture and the piles of books. What looked like art books were stacked on the floor beside Mrs. Farrell’s chair. Columns of matching dark blue volumes stood each side of the door to the hallway. Smaller books were jammed onto rough shelves under the window, and a set of little leather-bound ones, maroon with gold lettering, stood between bronze horse-head bookends on the mantelpiece. Beside them a photograph in a tarnished silver frame showed Mrs. Farrell, in a long white dress, beautiful as a film star, smiling up into the face of a tall, dark-haired man.

  “Is that Mr. Farrell?” Gillian could have kicked herself for asking such a stupid question. “He’s ever so handsome!”

  “Yes, that’s Michael.” Mrs. Farrell turned her head away to look out of the window. “Indeed he is handsome.” She looked back at Gillian with a sudden smile. “But I see you’re noticing my books, Gillian. Vanna tells me you like to read.”

  “Yes I do. More than anything!” Gillian looked at the small green book on the makeshift table beside Mrs. Farrell. “What’s that you’re reading, Mrs. Farrell?”

  The thin, work-roughened hand held out the book, the words Pride and Prejudice written in gold on the spine.

  “What does ‘prejudice’ mean?”

  “It means judging people by someone else’s ideas of them, not your own.”

  Gillian thought about that for a moment, before returning her attention to the book. On the first page she read, “To Deirdre with love from Papa”. She sounded it out in her head. Deirdre. It was the saddest name she had ever heard. Underneath that she read, Everyman’s Library, followed by the words, EVERYMAN, I will go with thee, and be thy guide, In thy most need to go by thy side. She looked up at Mrs. Farrell. “What does that mean?”

  “It’s in all the Everyman books. It means that a good book is a friend and teacher for life.”

  Gillian read the words again: In thy most need to go by thy side. It sounded better than Jesus. “Is it true?”

  “As true as I’m sitting here, Gillian. Everything you need to know is in books.” Mrs. Farrell took the book in her hand. “And there’s another thing. When I’m reading this book, for example,” she held it up, “as I’ve done many times, I may seem to be sitting in this room, in the middle of all this,” she waved the book at the shabby room, “but in my mind, I’m in another place and another time, in the world of this book.”

  “I know! And you don’t want to come back! I was like that with The Wind in the Willows when I finished it.”

  Mrs. Farrell smiled at her as if she had known her all her life. Looking like someone called The Blessed Damozel in a book at home in Swansea, she glanced down at the sleeping baby. “But now, Gillian,” she said, “Vanna says that you’re living here in Tregwyr with your grandparents because of the war. Tell me, do they not mind that she is Roman Catholic? I know the feeling is against us in the village.”

  “Um, well …”

  The back door burst open, and Vanna rushed, white-faced, into the room. “Everything’s gone!” she cried, “The baby, and the bed, and the fire, and everything! And it’s all my fault! I’ve lost the baby Jesus!” She began to sob, yanking fiercely on her plaits.

  Her mother stood up. “Calm down, Vanna. Don’t be so dramatic. You shouldn’t have taken it, but it’s not the end of the world. Did you look all around?”

  Vanna shook her head, gulping.

  “Well off you go to have another look.”

  “I’ll never find him! Never! Now our whole crèche is spoiled! It’s no good without Jesus! I’ve ruined all our Christmases for ever!” She wrung her hands, sobbing and gasping.

  “I’d go look, Mama, but I don’t know where.” Tears spilled down Francis’s cheeks.

  “We’ve lost the baby Jesus!” wailed Bridie, followed by howls of “Jethuth! Jethuth!” from Patrick, and screams from the startled baby.

  Mrs. Farrell picked up the baby and fetched a small packet of Smith’s Crisps which she began to dole out, one at a time. When they had all stopped crying, Gillian slipped out of the back door and ran to her grandparents’ house.

  She found her grandmother and Tommy weeding the front garden.

  “Grandma!” She stood as tall as she could. “I’m going to Vanna’s house right now. And I’m taking Tommy with me. Come on, Tommy.” She grabbed his hand and glared at her grandmother. “We’re going to help Vanna and Francis find Jesus.”

  Her grandmother, open-mouthed, but speechless for once, stared at Gillian over her glasses.

  Hand in hand, Gillian and Tommy ran down the garden path and up the road. When Gillian looked back from the corner, she saw that her grandmother had come out onto the pavement an
d was standing, trowel in hand, still staring.

  W

  Vanna got up to light another cigarette. “We did have some happy times together there in Tregwyr, didn’t we? For years really, until all that Eleven Plus business.” Her face became somber. “I know I did well enough for myself in the end, but I totally believed then, of course, that passing that exam was going to be my only ticket out of poverty.”

  Gillian put down her teacup. “I know. That’s what everyone said. You had to pass if you were ever going to make anything of yourself.” She sat back. “You know, I never did understand what happened to you then, Vanna. It was all very strange.”

  W

  In their last year at elementary school, Gillian and Vanna had thrown themselves into being Miss Thomas’s star pupils. They read and swapped every novel they could find, the latest being Ivanhoe from Mrs. Farrell’s collection, and Anne of Green Gables from Gillian’s. They wrote sensational stories and deeply affecting poems, which they read to each other, and to anyone else who would listen. They drilled each other before spelling and vocabulary quizzes and tested each other relentlessly in mental arithmetic, firing quick questions out of nowhere such as “Seven times thirteen?” or “fifteen plus eight, plus seven, divided by six?” which had to be answered almost as quickly.

  Gillian’s father would sometimes play this game with her at weekends, unlike Vanna’s father who always told them to “piss off.” Her mother, however, until the new baby came, would find time to read their compositions, giving equal attention to Gillian’s efforts. She encouraged them both to take the exam very seriously. Their whole lives might depend on it, she said, a theme that was echoed by their teacher.