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Singapore, October, 1926
And there came great rain, read Una Meredith aloud to a tumble of shuffling, rustling children, and much water…Here Una spared a glance out the window and reflected that the day's lectionary had turned unexpectedly apposite. The rain that year was savage. It often could be, this time of year, but even allowing for the usual perils and dangers of a Singapore October, Una couldn't recall anything like this. Middle Alley was flooding, to start with. Change Alley was following suit. Presently, rain drummed tinnily against the windowpanes while contrapuntally those same panes rattled in their frames. In the ACS, Barker road, several small necks craned in the direction of the yard; There would be no spider races or cricket this afternoon. Unobserved, Una winged a prayer heavenwards for the preservation of all teachers presently enduring the purgatory of Indoor Play.
The attention of the class was waning. Una stifled the mounting panic at the need to regain it. Three years of teaching had taught her that much.
'Remind me,' she said to no one in particular, 'The word for 'rain'…'
Several hands shot up and a volley of responses tumbled towards her. Una was in the midst of deciphering these when someone rapped smartly on the door. Immediately, the children hushed. English Only was the rule of the school, albeit one Una tended to conveniently misplace nine times in ten. Rev. Peach, standing in the doorway, knew it, too. Looking at him, Una didn't think for a minute that the veritable babble of seconds prior was at issue. He gestured Una into the hall, and she set the children to parsing Matthew 23, confident in the notion she would return to find them discussing something else entirely. Probably devising rules for indoor cricket. Or racing spiders. Both seemed plausible.
Una shut the door behind her. In the dim light of the hall, Rev. Peach looked more overworked than usual. 'Ipoh,' he said, without his usual, circuitous preamble, 'is flooded.'
There was, without question, a point to this observation, but for the life of her, Una couldn't see it for looking. She blamed the vexed combination of The Gospel According to Matthew, twenty-odd restless children and a fortnight's-worth of Indoor Play. Whoever had invented it deserved to be cast into outer darkness for at least the next forty years. Or perhaps wandering in the wilderness would suffice. Or just an evening with Puck. Yes, an evening with Puck might be mete and right punishment. He could throw peanuts on cue.
'So, naturally,' said Rev. Peach, infilling for Una unprompted, 'arrangements have got to be made for the children at Horely Hall.'
'Naturally,' said Una, automatically. Why hadn't she thought of the Ipoh school? Possibly, she thought unworthily, because if the Ipoh children were coming here, as was surely imminent, it meant more children and more indoor play. God help teachers everywhere, but especially those on Barker Road.
'Where are we putting them?' asked Una, because this seemed the logical point of conversational follow-up. 'We - they - will need beds. Linen. The sewing circle can fetch round for that. And clothes – what are they able to bring? Do we know?'
There were easily another forty questions in need of answering. Rev. Peach let her bombard him with them, saying only, and that placidly, 'I knew you could be relied upon to help.'
There followed a frantic morning in which Miss Bertram was rustled up to take Una's classes. This freed Una from the purgatory of Indoor Play, but left her to negotiate the influx of ACS children from Horley Hall. Where to put them, what to dress them in, what to feed them, where to get that food… By afternoon Una was convinced that for every question she answered, another ten arose. It was all one everlasting cycle reminiscent of presbytery meetings she had sat in on in girlhood, only less the religious politicking and plus half a dozen logistical nightmares.
By the time the school let out she was more than ready for tea, and almost missed Indoor Play.
Apparently this much was obvious when she returned to Evelyn Road, because Di greeted her with 'Long day?'
Di was supposed to be holidaying, having travelled to Singapore with her husband, less the children, who a world away were safely tucked up in what Una could suppose to be the significantly-less-rainy Ingleside. Not for the first time sicne Di's arrival, Una thought how good it was to have someone on hand who didn't speak Puck, but could speak Walter and appreciated innately the little ordinary irritations of the day. Carl seemed to live curiously adjacent to them - or perhaps, thought Una, as she stepped out of the wet, it was just that Carl's vexations were so very much bigger. She wrung water from her coat and spared a thought for Carl, sweethearting somewhere with the as yet unknown-to-Una person of Li, and the risks so casually interwoven with happiness. Why, she wondered, as Nenni the resident cat threaded her sleek spotted body around Una's ankles, did the best things have to come so hard won?
'I'll take that as a yes,' said Di, and Una realised perforce she never had answered the question.
'Sorry,' said Una. She unwrapped a silk scarf from around her head and wrung that, out. It - and she come to that - felt cold and smelled damp. Opposite her, Di shook her fiery head dismissively.
'Trade you,' Di said, and before Una could argue, whisked away the scarf and swapped it for Gladstone Blue Ribbon, brim-full of Assam. Her taste, and Di's, Una noticed in spite of herself – not Puck's.
'You're supposed to be on holiday,' said Una, but ineffectually. There had never been any telling Di Blythe – no that was wrong, it was McNeilly now – no. Except that once, Una thought, with a grimace, when Dr Blythe had refused to let her join the VAD…but there was no good dwelling on that.
'I am on holiday,' said Di, even as she gingerly patted the scarf dry. 'I just can't stand to be still. Blame Susan. All that talk about idle hands and the devil.'
'Cornelia, too,' said Una, inhaling the steamy, tannin-rich smell of the tea.
Di nodded sagely. She hung Una's scarf on its appointed peg and said conversationally, 'I got some marvellous shots of the boats going down Middle Alley, or think I did. I'm pleased.'
Una supposed that was the main thing in any holiday. She allowed Di to shepherd her into the sitting room, where Akela was lounging drowsily by a fire. It occurred to Una to wonder if that was Di's work or Alastair's because it was never Carl's. Nether of the Singapore Merediths were useful in the way of things like fires. In the Rainbow Valley era, fires had been Jerry's job, and in the war era there had been no call for Rainbow Valley bonfires, so Una had never got the habit. This one crackled and sputtered conversationally, resinous-smelling and blissfully warm after the walk back from Barker road. The tea in Gladstone Blue Ribbon could definitely be chalked up to Di and her everlasting need to get on with one thing or another. Una cradled her teacup close and shook her head indulgently, savouring the warmth of the china as it seeped into her chilled fingers. Nothing got into the soul, to Una's mind, faster than the drab coldness of unrelenting rain.
'I tell you,' said Di, taking a seat opposite her, 'the only thing our Wandering Merediths do differently to the rest of you is make the wandering literal rather than figurative. Otherwise you're all as bad as each other.'
Una smiled, laughed and shook her head. 'Faith missed it,' she said. 'She must have got it from Mama. Or the Holy Spirit. Both, I expect.'
Di shook her head, more ruddy and russet than ever in the glow of the fire. 'I never could understand all that bit about gifts,' she said. 'There always seems to be such a dearth of Interpreters.'
'There's a dearth of quite a lot of things,' said Una, by which improbable route she found herself seguing from The Holy Spirit to the mundane intricacies of the Horley Hall migration, the Flooding of Ipoh, and all the attendant wrangles.
'I think,' she said, wrapping up, 'we've just about sourced the stuff for beds. But the rest is anyone's guess. We'll sew what we can, I expect, but…'
'What you're going to do,' said Di, 'is write directly to Naomi Blake. You remember Rev Jo's girl . I have it in my head you were chums at Kingsport. You're nodding - there!' Di crowed triumphantly, because Una was nodding. Continuing, Di said, 'Naomi will then whip round the Glen and drum up more support than you know what to do with. Talk of gifts – hers is dividing the fishes and loaves like no one else.'
There was something in this, Una thought, with a pang for her old Kingsport friend and bygone afternoons of shared mission work. She hummed appreciation, the morning's undertaking feeling suddenly incrementally more achievable.
'She will, won't she?' said Una to no one in particular.
Di nodded anyway. Nenni minced her way along the settle to Una's knees, whereupon she circled three times with great meticulousness before assembling herself in a spotted doughnut of purring feline, paws carefully pillowing her velveteen chin. Thus arranged she commenced to thrum like a motor engine.
Una did write, and the letter went out, and the word no doubt forth to Glen St Mary that Una Meredith and the ACS needed everything from teaching supplies to clothing for the influx of Horley Hall children. A telegram shortly followed that Naomi had similarly alerted Kingsport to the problem and she and the Rev. Blake were attacking it as best they could.
In the meantime though, Una had double the usual number of children to teach and, accordingly, double the amount of marking. There were uniforms to sew, pending the parcels from Canada, and Di, helping, said it reminded her of the war.
'Piecing lives and pinning hopes,' she said with a smile that was dimmer than it ought to have been. 'That was Walter's line. Mind you,' said Di, finishing off a seam, 'this has all the urgency and somehow none of the dread. Why do you suppose that is?'
'I think,' said Una as she battled Puck for possession of a thimble, 'the war has thrown off the scale of everything. Little things seem terribly important and big things feel ordinary - or at least manageable - like this flood.'
And some things, Una thought but neglected to say, like Carl's evolving friendship with the enigmatic Li, remained as unnavigable as ever before. Puck made a fresh bid for the thimble and Nenni, spotting her prey in the wild, made a grab for an unsuspecting spool of thread. Di made to intervene, but Una said mildly, 'Let her have it for a bit.'
Di snorted. White thread ran riot across the floor of Trinity House, Nenni's paws click-clacking after it with aplomb. The spool ran afoul of a table leg and the cat pounced on it in ecstasies.
Di said, 'Here I thought you of all people, never played favourites.'
'I didn't,' said Una. 'Until I met Puck.'
Di laughed a wonderful, silvery laugh, almost the twin to Walter's, even now. Una thought with a pang that she would miss Di, when, inevitably, she and Alastair headed for home at the end of the month. She must have said it aloud, because Di broke off her sewing to wind an arm around Una's neck.
'And I you,' she said. 'If you don't write a weekly letter full of anecdotes about That Monkey and the misadventures Carl lands himself in, I'm going to be seriously disappointed. If you don't turn them into a novel - well, the world's missing out, darling.'
In another life, Una thought, she would have demurred and murmured something inconsequential about not being much of a writer. Now she reached reflexively backwards to squeeze the hand resting on her shoulder. It smelled pleasantly of tealeaves, fire and rainwater.
'I'll do my best,' said Una, and meant it.
Di grinned the Blythe grin, the one that was as wickedly charming and sharp-edged as it was ebulliant, and Una hastened to clarify, 'With the letters, you.' She poked Di none too gently in the ribs. 'Novels are the provinance of other people completely. Talk about gifts!'
They all laughed, crooned Ella to Louis on the gramaphone, and so did the girls.
She certainly had enough to write about. The children came by boat from Ipoh, because the causeway was flooded and there was no hope of running a train into the city. Una helped collect them from the quay, sopping wet and clutching precious bundles to their chests. They wobbled on the docks, still unsteady from the banana boats, and she steadied them as best she could. They snaked through the streets in crocodile fashion, though how or why their ragged line should be considered halfway like a crocodile defied Una in the explanation.
Carl can't explain it either, and says it's all wrong, she wrote to Di, and I suppose he would know. More like a snake, he makes them, and a ragtag one at that. Mind you, it hardly seems to matter in the greater scheme of things.
This included but was not limited to overcrowded classrooms, still more crowded dormitories, and still no relief from the dreaded Indoor Play. Somehow, this seemed the greatest evil of all. It happens every year, ran yet another letter, and every year it catches me off-guard. This year, Una supposed it was all the worse for there being twice as many children and, in consequence, twice as much frustrated energy. Also the lesser but equally vexed problem of twice as much marking. Not, she confessed to Di, that there's time for it, between teaching them, and sewing for them and half a dozen other things that none of us teachers minds doing, but do take time.
There were not enough desks. That was the first problem to rear its head once the sodden snake-cum-crocodile of relocated children had been settled. Una tackled it head-on by reallocating of cushions from Trinity House to her classroom. Of course, these manifestly got in the way of such wooden desks as the little room did have, so Una pushed those up against the wall. They smelled of damp; everything smelled of damp. With the desks out of the way she sat her collection of children down on the floor, in the name of equality, the better to fit everyone in. They sat lotus-fashion after the manner of monks that had once struck Una as foreing but now only struck her as Buddhist or Taoist or some other local -ist. It was impossible to write like that, of course. This became apparent in a more than usually haphazard rendering of Dictation. So back Una went to Trinity House, Evelyn road in the evening and mined Carl's library for the largest, most neglected books to do double duty as desks. Several of these were encyclopaedias, and sporadically Carl was heard to lament their vanishing. When this happened, Una did her best to eke out the book in question, tuck it awkwardly under one arm and heft it home through the rain.
You would probably have a stern word for him,, she wrote to Di, but it's Carl and I've never been any good at telling him No. Besides, there's always another book or ten I can swap in without much bother. He has so many and he forgets the ones not directly under his nose! Besides, they make excellent, durable umbrellas - only don't say to your mother that I said so!
The rain went on, and the little ACS school on Barker road stood firm in the face of the mounting water. Parcels began to arrive to the cumulative relief of Una, the Rev. Peach and the Anglo-Chinese School generally. By then Una had quite forgot the English Only rule in an effort to inspire amity between the Horley Hall and Barker Road cohorts, so that more often than not her classroom was overrun with the merry babel of something the Rev. Peach called Baba Malay. As she told Di, it's neither Tamil, nor Chinese nor English but half a dozen languages at once and all anyone can do to keep up with them. I should love to hear Faith's opinion on it – she has such a knack with languages. But Faith, of course, was in Kingsport, working with the Rev. Blake to see the Barker Road school had all the medical supplies it needed, in addition to the incoming clothing and paper stock. It was all keenly appreciated, and caused the women's sewing circle no end of relieved fingers, but there was no sidestepping the children's rising overtiredness and a healthy dose of homesickness. In quiet moments, she wrote between dictation assessments, it is all a bit much.
This last, at least, got through. There was no otherwise accounting for the afternoon Una arrived home to find Carl clumsily shuffling the contents of the living room about, while Nenni watched horrified from the mantel.
'Carl,' said Una, helpless, 'what are you doing?'
'I'm making space for your Ipoh children,' said Carl, as if this was very obvious.
Several things occurred to Una as conversational rejoinders. None of these managed to translate themselves from thought into speech. She shook water from her scarf and said inarticulately, 'You…'
'Well, they can't all go on sleeping at Barker Road,' said Carl, undeterred. He was a bit breathless, perhaps for trying to shunt the settle, which was a beautiful robin's egg blue with darkly curled wooden legs, but otherwise fine. 'Isn't that what you said over dinner the other night?'
Una blinked. Nenni looked disapproving. Carl paused for breath, bent double over the settle and said, 'That is what you said?'
'Did Di write to you?' asked Una, because she was too flabbergasted to come up with anything more directly relevant. It was Carl's turn to blink. Nenni continued to look disapproving. Carl frowned and said, 'Not that I know of.'
'Right,' said Una. She tried but failed to take in the criss-crossed stripes left behind on the carpet by furniture trails and the rings in the places where heavier pieces had long sat idle. None of it registered. They were only amorphous geometrical patterns made stark by the dim, afternoon light. But there was Carl, puffing and squinting in the midst of it all, trying to make things function as God intended.
Una close her eyes, breathed deeply and said, recovering, 'Thank you.'
'Whatever for?' asked Carl, apparently genuinely perplexed.
Una supposed that made two of them. She pulled him into a hug, beaming and thought how Di would laugh and laugh over this as and when it got into a letter. Nenni, seizing her opportunity, leapt from the mantelpiece and made a grab for Carl's undefended ankles in retribution for his unauthorised reallocation of her furniture. The siblings fell to the ground laughing amidst the criss-crossed furniture dents and imprints. An indignant Nenni, having failed to carry her particular and obscure point, streaked away. Oh, it would be a properly entertaining letter, Una thought.
That it didn't get written up directly owed largely to the attendant chaos in transferring several dozen children down the street and round the corner to Trinity house. There were beds to make up and meals to cater for, and Puck to mollify. This last was Carl's job.
By and large, Una thought he succeeded. Or perhaps it was merely that the children were kinder to Puck than was her natural inclination. There being no possible way to accommodate the children around the Trinity House table, they took their meals, like their lessons, to the floor. And if Puck made to steal their food, the children gave as good as they got. If he threw peanuts, they threw them right back, rivalling his squeals of horror with battle cries of their own. When he appropriated this or that makeshift bed they cuddled him into submission, or else until he wriggled away shrieking his defense of personal space. Once, Una came home, marking in hand, to find them all at Ludo, Carl, children, and Puck inclusive. Puck was losing badly and the living room, such as it had been was in chaos.
And yet, she said, finally putting some of this latest adventure to paper for her friend, I wouldn't have it any other way. None of us would. And when they go, I shall miss them. I shouldn't be surprised to find out it's true, the old verse in Matthew – and yet I am, for all that. For there came great rain, and much water, but the house stood firm.