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“I say, did you know Susan’s blued a birthday present on a mincing machine? To improve the pemmican.” – Peggy Blackett, Pigeon Post
- - -
It was a matter of, once having discovered, not being able to forget.
Susan picked up the huge thermos again, twisting it under the electric light so that the smoothed curve of the sides glinted. Then, carefully, wistfully, she set it down, back onto the display shelf. This was the main jar model of the whole range of the brand, one great gallon-sized insulated flask, but the main structure could also be used with an additional four individual containers in which food could wait, neatly stacked, ready to cook and cool enough if necessary to keep until that happened.
It had a comfortable wooden grip on the handle, painted green to match the green enameled exterior, sleek and modern. She could see the thing emerging from her knapsack on a windswept mountainside, ready to dispense a stew prepared the night before to hungry explorers.
“Is Madam attended to?” asked a voice.
Jolted from her considerations, Susan twisted round and smiled politely.
It was one of the thronging penguins who had addressed her, out of the many crowding out this section of the Army and Navy stores, perhaps the one that had set up the nearby camping equipment display on a little square of green baize, with the guy ropes of the tent pulled too tight and the mannequin of a woman in a spotless white dress that looked highly flammable tending a pan on a tinfoil fire.
“I’m quite alright, thank you,” Susan said, in her best voice for the sort of penguins you wanted to reassure in order that as quickly as possible they would leave you alone.
The penguin smiled back and went away, waddling slightly and aptly in his black tailcoat, to some others who were looking critically at garden chairs with fringes on the cushions.
Susan sighed and calculated the whole thing in her head again, as though it might make a difference: sixty-three shillings was impossible on her birthday money, and that wouldn’t include the individual containers at 12/6 extra each.
There was the ‘utility’ model, at a quarter of the size, for only 11/6. That would be manageable, with change for the bus to have longer out and still not be late back in St John’s Wood for dinner.
It would be hard to explain, though. Too small to really be useful, but too big to keep concealed in her current habitation.
It was not an encouraging reflection. She bit her lip, and picked up the ‘safari’ size jar again.
It would be warm against the hand, slightly, even with the insulation, when full of a good hot meal. She would be reaching down into the bag and feeling it, checking it was there, and then looking up, nodding, and on they’d all go across the heather, on a fresh, clear, bright day, up at the roof of the world, with nothing but green for miles.
“Miss, may I help you?”
A female penguin this time, and not smiling.
“I’m deciding, thank you,” Susan said, with the smile flying in the rigging, ready to repel boarders.
“We have some lovely kitchen sets on the next floor, Miss, if you’re looking for something in that line. Or if you go to the Victoria Street entrance, that is where the wedding lists can be set down.”
“Thank you, I’m not furnishing a kitchen.” Susan had put the thermos down again. She had left a few fingerprints on it but they were rapidly fading as if they had never been.
The penguin sniffed, looking not entirely pleased. Penguins were not imaginative creatures, and tended to want to do the same thing over and over again, because it worked for them and they had never done any different. That was why they were penguins, to her. Even on a hot July day in London, it was easier to see them all as penguins than anything else. That made it all slightly easier to take.
Susan looked from the gallon to the quart size and back, and reminded herself that she was capable of being patient.
“Oh, I say,” said yet another voice behind her.
Susan turned, and then, seeing, smiled properly for the first time in what felt like weeks and quite possibly had been.
“Hullo Peggy!”
“Hullo. Sorry I’m late.” Peggy came over, and pointed to the thermos at once. “I thought that was the one you meant in your letters. It looks even better than in the catalogue, doesn’t it?”
“Doesn’t it just?” Peggy was a little late, but though the wait had felt eternal none of it mattered now – nothing mattered just for a moment.
“You’d need at least two, though,” Peggy was continuing, still studying the jar, face flushed – she’d probably run all the way from the station. “Really you would, even for just your lot.”
Susan sighed and nodded. Two safari jars would come to over ten pounds, which might as well have been a hundred.
But it did not feel as discouraging to look at the unobtainable as it had done a few moments earlier. It wasn’t the thermos flasks she was pining for anyway, she knew that really. And it was good of Peggy to understand that, and yet still to talk about thermoses.
“Was the train awful?” Susan enquired, and although it was polite, she very much meant it.
Peggy made an illustrative face but shrugged. “Mmm. Not really. Penguins. You’re right, they are penguins, all huddled. And it’s harder when you’re on your own.”
Susan nodded quickly. Sometimes being understood was almost harder to bear than anything else. For nearly a month, people had looked at her and the glances slid off like the light on the thermos, no rough edges, no corners, no features at all, no sense of what was within. And herself kept inside, safe.
“Now, first things first, mustn’t forget!” Peggy, brisk again, reached in her satchel bag, which was a sturdy brown canvas. Susan, dressed of necessity in camouflage, had a leather handbag with a metal clasp that would be ruined if ever allowed to be rained on and thus remained more or less useless as a practical item.
But it hadn’t rained for a week, London was dry and thick with dust, and practicality must operate on several levels.
After some rummaging – “Ah, that was where the banana went, then,” – Peggy brought out one slightly bent envelope, then another. “I’ve got the letters.”
“Thank you.” Susan took them. In the handing over, their hands brushed and Peggy’s rope callouses were rough and enviable.
“We do all think it’s frightfully heroic.” Peggy said earnestly.
“Someone had to,” Susan pointed out. “And getting this will help. If Titty followed what I sent?”
“Pored over it, wrote the letter to order, as far as I know. I think John checked it over after, as well, to make sure it was shipshape. Reports of good behaviour and going to the Rio Museum to see the flint arrowheads and doing the holiday tasks – she mentions needing the stuff again, to jolly well make it clear you had to come here today. And then this one has the description of the things to get. I said you might as well buy the right type, once you were here.”
Susan looked again at the top envelope. It was marked, in Titty’s careful block capitals:
MOST SECRET
Secret Agent S.W.
Deep in Enemy Territory
Most Urgent
By Hand
“Nancy said that they ought to shave my head, tattoo it on my skull, let the hair grow back and then send me off that way,” said Peggy, grinning. “Might have taken a while though.”
Then Peggy really would have had to come down herself, Susan reflected. Whereas the Royal Mail, though distinctly unpiratical, would have sufficed for the transmission of Susan’s alibi to have one day’s parole at the Army and Navy stores, and not interrupted anyone else’s holiday.
If one of the others had done it, broken into their precious time to come south on a needless mission, Susan would have been almost annoyed. She was here so that they didn’t have to be, after all. It could so easily have been all of them stuck in London, if Susan hadn’t thought of saying that she’d like to have time alone in adult company. Which was not quite a lie, because the necessary condition of that was the others, free, in the Lakes and roaming, even if they still needed to write their own good conduct reports.
She missed them horribly, but equally might not quite want to have been seen this way, had one of them come.
But Peggy understood, more than most, and it had been Peggy, after all, who had concocted this scheme to buy a day’s time together – not that the others hadn’t suggested many wonderful things, but those tended to involve more fire and muskets and ropes made of bedsheets than was practicable.
So Susan had agreed, and here Peggy was, and it was so good to see someone real.
Now Susan slid her thumb under the flap of her envelope, having carefully pocketed the other, and neatly tore it open.
Dear Susan, read the letter.
H5III.i.5-9
Oxford Science Notebook Type 4, fawn or olive, lined with margin, 5d
With love
Titty
“Oh Titty,” Susan sighed, and had to bite her lip again.
“You know it, then?” From the look on Peggy’s face, she herself knew what was in the letter already. Susan could imagine it, all of them sitting around the campfire and watching Titty writing, lying on her stomach, kicking her legs in the air the way she always did.
“Yes,” Susan said now. “It was in my School Certificate prep. Titty was helping me get it by heart at Easter, in Portsmouth.” She cleared her throat. “In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man/ As modest stillness and humility, / But when the blast of war blows in our ears, /Then imitate the action of the tiger:/ Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood…” she let out a breath. “Henry the V, Act III Scene !.”
She didn’t usually need to be anyone’s warrior king. But it was rather nice, really, to think that some of them at least could see her that way.
And right at this moment, If Peggy could see her nose turning red, she didn’t say anything about it. Just, “Would your sinews like some tea, Susan, do you think, before the stationery department? Have you got time?”
Susan put away the second letter. “I said it might take me a while, if the shop was busy, and that I had to be sure to get Titty and Roger exactly what the holiday tasks needed. She believed that, she hardly ever goes out. And besides, it was true,” Susan was reassuring herself somewhat now. Mother and Father had asked her to be good to her Grandmother, and downright lying really wasn’t under that heading, blast of war or not.
-
Penguins bustled all through the Army and Navy Stores restaurant, muttering and murmuring about schools and colonial postings, furnishings and decorations, electric vacuum cleaners and new kinds of dresser sets.
When Peggy and Susan got a table, a few heads turned to watch them. Peggy wasn’t in camouflage in the slightest, after all, but rather in a shirt and shorts and sandals, looking, exactly accurately, as if she had just stepped off a train from the country. The Blacketts almost never came to London, Susan knew. Hopefully, Peggy wasn’t uncomfortable, was either brave or oblivious.
“When’s your next train? Have you got time for this yourself?”
“I can get the last one, if I need, there’s some hens moving on it and they’re sending a cart from Jackson’s to the station. I can ride on that home.”
“So late? You won’t make it to camp.” It wasn’t right to speak the names of the places, not here with penguins all around. But Susan was picturing the island, every inch of it. She could imagine the mud between her toes, the scent of the leaf litter, the lap of the water at the landing place.
Peggy shook her head. “Be fine. We’re in the garden at home.”
“You mean you didn’t all start already?”
“As if it would be the same!” Peggy’s eyes were very wide. She coughed, looked down and adjusted her knife and fork. “As if they’d let us, without you,” she added.
“You make better porridge than I do,” Susan said, because she had to say something quickly again.
No use to anyone, my dear Susan, you need to understand that, her Grandmother said, living the way you do, unladylike, harum scarum.
Susan had bitten her tongue to hold back the laughter. She was none of those things, and having short hair and chapped lips and knowing how to skin a rabbit didn’t change that, even if Grandmother thought young ladies ought still to be behaving how they had in 1885.
That was one reason Grandmother had accepted the others going North, of course, because she thought Susan needed her entire attention.
She hadn’t told Mother about any of that, not least because it was all far too foolish to be upsetting. Mother had been so grateful that Susan was prepared to keep Grandmother company whilst Mother and Father were together in Malta, but she’d told Susan to say if it was too hard, or if she wanted to get away to the lakes too much. Susan, however, was entirely determined that she was going to stick it out, all the way to victory, Mother and Father wouldn’t need to cut one day from their holiday either.
Writing to Peggy, though, somehow the words had gone down onto the page. Grandmother wasn’t like the GA, not vigorous, more wheedling and sniping and yet so helplessly well-intentioned. It really hurt her, seeing Susan in a pair of trousers – the poor old lady would tremble with anxiety, horrors she’d never been taught names for whispering in her ear.
“Just two more weeks,” Peggy said now, with that look again that said she understood all of it, the warrior you did have to be, really, even in real life. Especially in real life. “And we’ll have all the rest of the summer then, and you too.”
“Wouldn’t that thermos jar be wonderful?” Susan had to be practical, there was nothing else to be here, in this squashed, bustling place, where everything could be overheard.
“You could make it be,” Peggy told her.
The waitress brought a tray of tea, which Susan would not have allowed to brew for as long as it evidently had.
They talked about camping equipment and making culottes and whether every First Aid kit ought to have burns ointment, and trains and weather and the cost of ice-cream, and other things penguins couldn’t object too.
Peggy’s eyes were dark and bright, and could look at her and see who she was, and Susan took it in like Cumbrian air, and could be patient a little longer.