The King’s Arms Market Street Maidstone Kent
Dear April Sorry I couldn’t say goodbye. I hope you are well and didn’t get into too much trouble. I didn’t mean to set the camp on fire it was an accident. Write back in invisible ink or a code. In haste.

Love from Ruby. P.S Your best friend. I started to write back at once in the Dancing Men code from the Sherlock Holmes story. It took ages, and it was only after I had posted it that I realized that Ruby would not be able to read it because I had the book. If they ever gave me any pocket money again, I would save every penny for the fare to Maidstone. After a day or two I told Betty about Ruby’s letter and Percy went round to see Constable Cox to give him Lex and Gloria’s address, but we never heard what happened. ‘They were shamed into flight,’ said Betty.

‘I wish we’d done more. Poor little Ruby, even Miss Fay was concerned about her.’ Veronica was useless at thinking of things to do and trailed round after me saying, ‘What shall we play?’

‘I know a game called Lady Marlene,’ I said once in desperation.

‘How do you play it?’

‘You dress up and do ladylike things.’

‘Shall we play it then?’

‘No.’

Veronica screamed and flapped at Dittany’s bees, practically forcing one of them to sting her, and I was pleased when the drake bit her on the leg.

‘You’re not very kind to poor Veronica, are you?’ Betty said one day. Things were almost back to normal at home now.

‘She’s a bore. She smells of marmite.’

I went upstairs to write another letter to Ruby. I hadn’t heard from her for a while.

‘ “One misty morning

When cloudy was the weather,

There I met an old man

Dressed all in leather …” ‘

Mr Greenidge stepped out into my path on the way to school, making me jump.

‘ “Dressed all in leather

With his cap under his chin.

How do’you do and how d’you do And how d’you do again?”

‘How do you do, April? I don’t do very well. Why have you turned against me? You cross the street to avoid me, you hardly speak to me in the tea-room. Please, April. Stop hurting me so.’ ‘I’ll be late for school.’

‘Meet me later, please. I beg you.’

‘I can’t.’

‘Please.’

‘What about Mrs Greenidge?’

‘The old dragon won’t know, will she? She’s hardly likely to come breathing fire down Lovers Lane in her present state of health.’

‘She isn’t a dragon. You’re an old – werewolf.’

‘Werewolf,’ corrected Mr Greenidge. ‘You don’t really think that, do you, April? You don’t hate me, do you?’

A dew-drop sparkled on the end of his nose like the diamonds on the gates and fences. He looked so sad that I had to say no. I’d always thought they were called werewolves because they were wolves sometimes.

‘Bless you for that, my darling. Run along to school now, I’ll see you later. Mind how you go.’

Miss Elsey’s playground whistle pierced the mist, and I ran. The Virginia creeper on the Rising Sun was turning scarlet again and the new landlady was sweeping the porch.

‘You’ll be late. Hurry up or you won’t half cop it,’ she called out in a friendly way as I ran past.

I couldn’t care less. Sometimes out of habit, Miss Fay called out Ruby Richards when she took the register even though Ruby’s name had been crossed off. Present, Miss Fay.

I had nothing to say to Mr Greenidge when we met. We walked past the Paper Mill. Leo Silver was balancing along the stone ridge of the waterfall. He saw us and waved, almost overbalancing.

‘I’m in quarantine,’ he shouted. ‘Chicken pox.’

His face was covered in spots.

‘Mind you don’t fall in, young man,’ called Mr Greendige, and muttered, ‘serve him right if he does.’

‘Is that your new boyfriend, April? Is that what’s been going on behind my back? Have you been consorting with that spotty young hooligan, eh? I warned you against getting mixed up with that lot, didn’t I, and look what happened at their so-called garden party.’

‘You told the police about the secret camp! You went there spying on me and Ruby. I do hate you and Leo’s my friend so there!’

‘Hey, hey, now now. I didn’t mean it. It’s not the boy’s fault I suppose. Look what I’ve got in my pocket for you.’

‘No.’

‘Three guesses.’

‘No, I don’t want to.’

‘It is a - toffee? Is it a – propelling pencil perhaps? No. It’s a liquorice pipe!’

At the mention of the propelling pencil I had to look at him. He was grinning and dangling a black pipe with pink tobacco.

‘Thank you.’

‘That’s better.’

‘Why didn’t you bring Liesel?’

‘She was reluctant to leave Mrs Greendige’s side. She’s been asking after you, you know.’

‘Liesel has?’

‘Mrs G. My better half.’

‘Oh.’

I made Veronica come with me to take Mrs Greendige a bunch of Michaelmas-daisies the next day. I could tell that she knew that Veronica wasn’t really my best friend. Veronica was scared of Liesel, and of Mr Greendige who was not pleased to see her.

‘Do you want to come truffle-hunting with us ready tomorrow morning?’ said Bobs on Saturday. ‘Looking for fungi in the woods.’

‘Yes, go, April. Better than moping around like a dying duck in a thunderstorm. Bring us back some mushrooms for breakfast,’ Betty said.

‘What about Sunday school?’

‘It won’t hurt to miss it for once, and it doesn’t seem to do you much good. Anyway, you’ll probably be back in time,’ said Percy.

‘You must think I’m mad, out there like Nebuchadnezzar in the grass, but the thing is – I …’

‘Sorry?’

‘You know, Nebuchadnezzar the King of the Jews? Bought his wife a pair of shoes?’

Now he’ll think I’m an anti-Semitic loony.

‘I beg your pardon?’ he says.

Pardon Mrs Arden, me chicken’s in your garden.

‘Are you in some sort of trouble? Can I help at all?’

His grey watered-silk eyes are kind but he is just a boy. To his left, a screen displays a collage made by Sunday-school children. There is a table of paperback books below the blue Mothers’ Union banner with white fleur-de-lys.

‘No. I don’t think so. But thank you. You see, I’ve just found, I used to live here, and I’ve just come across the grave of my oldest, my dearest, my best…’

I run out of the church. Where the light streams through stained glass as it did onto the landing at Kirriemuir when you could change the day to gold, emerald, sapphire or ruby red by holding a sweet paper up to your eye.

I am sitting on the bench outside when I hear the iron key turn in the lock and his footsteps on the stone flags, hesitating. I could look up from the mirror of my compact but I deny him the chance to comfort me, a hard-faced woman with a mascaraed tissue crumpled in her lap applying lipstick in the cruel sunshine.

I walk past cottages leaning against each other in gardens of flowers and beans and sun-split speckled tomatoes on withered vines, past the war memorial by the river and white Beulah House with its dovecot and campanile, past the school playground with a bleached mitten unravelling on a spike of the fence, and I see Ruby everywhere. On her bicycle, by the fuchsia hedge of the Rising Sun, red and purple, and the leaves of the Virginia creeper hang limply in the heat.

The gravel of Kirriemuir has been laid to lawn, the hedge has gone and a child’s bicycle lies on its side on the grass. Sometimes, in memory, that pink quilted bed is as innocuous as a rose, and I think, what Mr Greenidge did wasn’t really so bad. I am as sure that he loved me as I am certain that Rodney Pegg used his bicycle for excursions to the country to prey on little girls. And then I remembered how Mr Greenidge corroded my childhood with fear and anxiety and deceit. I still dream sometimes that Liesel is alive again.

The post office is gone and the Co-op has been converted into somebody’s front room, but amazingly, Belinda-Jayne is still there and the other shops under different names, except for Boddy’s where a descendant of T. D. Boddy is still butchering and purveying. The village is so little changed and yet the last establishment I expect to find is the Copper Kettle.

The kettle is boiling over with pansies and trailing geraniums, the tea-room hasgrown a shop on its left-hand side. A wooden sign says ANTIQUES BYGONES KITCHENALIA. I stand, empty as a sieve sluiced with tears, and stare. Kitchenalia. There is a tub of wooden rolling pins, out Kitchmagig potato masher. Utensils with scorched handles of yellow banded in green, rusted bun tins that fancy leaves on the bottoms of your fairy cakes, boxes of steel knives and forks and spoons, a St Ivel cream-cheese glass painted with blue flowers, a yellow kitchen cabinet with sliding glass doors, pale-blue Pyrex pudding dishes, a Chad Valley swan and a big tin Triang tortoise. There is the enamel Forestry Commission sign with painted flames that used to hang above the fire brooms in Tippetts Wood. I cannot bear to look inside the tea-room itself. I might catch some stranger by the arm and say, ‘We used to have little pink-shaded lamps and fresh flowers on every table and fairy-lights.’ People are rummaging through the boxes outside the shop, I know what they’re up to, with their Kitchenalia, purchasing pieces of our lives. They are trying to buy their way into the past they think we had, they want to be snug and safe down Rabbit Lane. A thousand bus tickets faded to the colours of old ration books won’t get them there and they can force all the carrots in the world through a Mouli grater, but they’ll never find their way into the burrow where Bobbity and Sandy live.

Walking back to the station I pass or am passed by various imposters who imagine that they live here, but I know that the real people of Stonebridge are all about me, in Brownie uniforms or their mothers’ shoes, wearing rhubarb leaves as sunhats and painting their lips red with a Smartie, pursuing their concerns as they always do. They are fishing for crayfish or preparing for a Grand Dance at the Village Hall. They are shopping at the Co-op and sewing run-and-fell seams under the tutelage of Miss Fay, whose dancing shoes are waiting in her desk, and piercing the grass with the steel tips of flimsy easels. They are acing along the High Street in a box on wheels and sitting on the bridge swinging their legs over the river shouting out rude comments to passers-by. Had yer eyeful, or d’you want the ha’penny change?

Whatever became of those glass salt-and-pepper pots with red Bakelite caps that I won at the Silvers’ garden party? Hoopla they may be kitchenalia now, but Leo is standing on the ridge of the waterfall waving, ‘I’m in quarantine,’ invulnerable to the bomb that blew him to pieces on a photographic assignment to Cambodia for his newspaper. A balloon floats past like a soap bubble on a string.

Up Station Hill under the overhanging trees with the rough hempen smell of a sack on my face. Ruby missed Charmaine Binnegar’s wedding to John Cheeseman and the birth of Charmaine’s pigeon pair, Pearl and Dean, a few months later. We thought they might have the reception at the Copper Kettle but the Vinnegars hired the village hall, luckily as it turned out, because a prawn cocktail fight broke out and Constable Cox was called. Anyway, we didn’t have a licence.

I wrote to Ruby about it but my letter came back marked ‘Gone Away’. It was not long after that that Percy and Betty, both of them broken with tears, told me that we were so badly in debt that we had to go back to London and lodge at the Drovers Tavern until we got back on our feet and found a tenancy somewhere.

Ruby and I lost touch.

I am sitting on the station opposite the platform where Professor Linus Scoley descended from the train. The booking hall is closed. I had to come in the side entrance, and I neither know nor care when there will be a train. White bindweed is tumbling down the fence behind me and the little pink convolvulus running around the iron feet of the bench. The advertisement for Virol has gone, undoubtedly sold as an amusing rusty Bygone. I press the clayx of a white bindweed bloom to feel the flower jump out and smell the rank green scent. Grandmother, grandmother, pop out of bed. Why did Ruby never try to contact me when we were older? There aren’t so many Harlencys in the London phone book that she couldn’t have located me, through Peter, after I had married and changed my name for a while. Did she write to the Copper Kettle and were her letters returned, or did she think that I just hadn’t bothered to reply to her or that I had found a new best friend? Perhaps, as I did, she thought we had all the time in the world to find each other again.

Robert Coppard. I picture a big, gentle man with hair the colour of copper-beech leaves in a work shirt washing putty from his hands at a kitchen sink. He gives his children the left-over putty which they sniff, loving its smell, and roll into silvergrey balls and slap between their hands to make imprints of their small palms laced with the lines of destiny. A teller of tales. Or perhaps he is an artist rising clay from his fingers, while in his studio a head of Ruby wrapped in wet cloths waits for resurrection, a sculpture that will transcend the standard stone bed spread with a green marble quilt.