End of Summer By Mrs Chris Hazelgrove
Level with her travel stung eyes, the name plate gleamed: St Joseph’s Home for Orphans. She re-read it, knew the summer holiday was over, knew that the life she had always known was over.
There was no journey in her memory, and Lily could recall no packing up, no goodbyes to school friends or family at the gate, no overnight stay somewhere to make possible the long and difficult transfer she and her mother must have made.
“Well, here we are ,“ her mother said, in that particular way she had of stating the obvious. She put down Lily’s tiny cardboard suitcase, and leaned more heavily on the wall of the porch.
A chill gust of wind flipped under the hem of Lily’s coat, finding her bare knees. A swirl of brown leaves chased, breaking formation against the brick red porch before whisking upwards and away.
One small leaf remained trapped in a cobweb, abandoned and flapping as its fellows soared and parted company.
That she had arrived here in Surrey from her seaside home in Lancashire dismayed the child, not least because she had taken the precaution of leaving her favourite pink-striped pebble in the church after Sunday school.
She had hummed to herself through weeks of round-the-table speculations by uncle, her teacher, the vicar and a social worker. She strove to close her ears to the unwelcome information, rejected their final decision.
But it had happened anyway; they were sending her away to this place.
The building was vast. Bigger than the rectory or Royal Albert Hotel, the facade loomed. Between the grizzled walls and cerulean sky a white clock tower showed slices of a huge grey bell.
She clutched her mother’s hand, before turning to look back. Lawns fell away for a distance even greater than the park near the sea front at home.
A fringe of trees formed a dense right angle where hobgoblins might live and where brown-gold leaves conspired to hide the road along which their bus must have travelled.
Four parallel white lines were just visible in the centre of the grass expanse. A memory, sudden and sharp, struck her as her nostrils evoked the fading summer, its whitened kneepads and linseed oil stoked onto cricket bats.
She recalled that blistering day her older brothers were called from the pavilion to stand with their heads bowed before their mother, how the players awaited their return to the game by tossing the ball from hand to hand, dabbing bats into the crease.
They wore black armbands their mother had made, later transferring them from their white shirt sleeves to khaki. Lily remembered too the sleepy-body smell of her sister in their shared bed and the family’s noisy tears on the day the great black car drove up.
One side of the grass square was bounded by rougher growth, now yellowing. Fresh-painted football posts stood sentinel at either end.
The child and her mother stood on the fourth side, at the top of two steep terraces. Lily imagined lying on her side and rolling down them, one after the other, reaching the cricket pitch in one go and then running - running for ever and ever.
Incipient tears pricked at the lining of her nose and stung her eyes. In this unfamiliar place she ached behind her face and in her throat. Her tummy churned in a confusion of pains she knew even omniscient grown-ups would not understand.
She wanted above all things to go home. She felt dwarfed, shrunken like Alice in Wonderland when she obeyed the label and drank the potion.
Aunts, who only occasionally visited, would frighten her, saying “My how you’ve grown. If you go on like this you’ll hit the ceiling.” Now the reverse was happening and she had dwindled in this vast landscape, outside this huge house that would never be home.
There was hardly a sound: no gulls careening, no rigging clattering, no voices even, though her mother had promised her lots of children to play with. There was no grown-up chatter like in the kitchen at home, no wireless, no shouts of anger.
She recalled bursts of laughter rising from the street outside at night. But here, over the swish of the wind in the branches, she heard only a brown bee that zinged as it batted at the powdery mortar gripping chunks of flint in the wall.
The glossy green paint of the doors had been sun-blistered into crisp domes. Lily’s fore-finger itched to press them and feel those bulges burst, as she had burst the tar bubbles on the sun-baked road at home.
A shining brass disc set into the flints had a tempting centre of white porcelain with the word press in firm black letters. Focusing on the bell push to prevent the fall of welling tears, she said, “Do you think we should ring it?”
“Perhaps we’ll just knock”, her mother replied, as though that were a more modest, more acceptable method of attracting attention. Mrs Dyson stretched out her hand to the black iron stirrup on the door, but her gesture coincided with the movement of Lily’s finger, as, Alice-like, she obeyed the white button’s instruction and pressed.
Along with the crack of the knocker sounding against its plate, the bright chime of a bell echoed inside the house. A rumble of metal followed, as a bolt slid from its housing.
The doors parted and between them a lady with cheeks of spreading redness smiled down. She held onto the knobs, one in each hand, and bent her head forward, assessing.
Lily grabbed a fistful of black serge coat, remembering now who this stranger must be, and why they were here. She saw that her mother had paled and watched her lips flutter with words reluctant to leave her mouth, watched her tongue flick in and out. She loosened Lily’s grip and straightened up, pushing her little suitcase over the threshold with the end of one crutch.
“I’m Edna Dyson, and this is Lily,” her mother said, nudging the child forward.
The lady’s hand was a soft, warm weight on Lily’s shoulder. When the matron began to guide her through the double doors she looked round for reassurance.
But her mother had turned away and Lily only saw her hunched back retreating, and heard only the uneven crunch and scrape of her crutch as she shuffled away down the gravel path.
