Barbara Todd - Miss Ranskill Comes Home

If there were a bomb, it must be a very well-behaved one, decided Miss Ranskill. Then, remembering Marjorie’s remark about delayed action, she set down her armful of tools and put her fingers in her ears. It was an ignominious gesture, but what could she do?

Had she really come home to watch, like a fiddling Nero, while her old friend crawled serenely to death, was she witnessing some charade or had she gone mad?

Marjorie butted the greenhouse door with her head, Miss Sprink or Miss Jebb pumped furiously and Miss Jebb or Miss Sprink shifted the spare bucket from one hand to another. Both of them had set, stern faces.

Miss Ranskill’s mind slid back to a day years ago when she, motoring from Dorset, had seen the car in front of her slew across the road, climb a steep bank, overturn and poise quiveringly, while a whole family tumbled down into the road. The accident had not seemed real at the time: it had been only a series of pictures seen at a cinema. She had watched with more interest than horror. So she watched now. But then her hands and feet had responded automatically as she had pulled up her own car.

She removed her fingers from her ears and took a few uncertain steps towards the women by the buckets.

So might a young recruit feel, staring assishly at the hand-grenade dropped by the instructor, wondering if it was a dud or not – if he’d only make a fool of himself by chucking it out of the trench – or not. The soldier would soon know….

Miss Ranskill, also worried by a trial in etiquette, was to know quite soon.

Only Marjorie’s heels were visible. The pump squeaked, the bucket jangled. Were the almost domestic sounds of this strange new England to be overmastered by a crashing explosion? Was Marjorie –?

‘There was a head laying by the pavement – clean cut off by the flying glass!’

Where had she heard that? Today, of course, since she came home. And she, instead of Marjorie who had a husband and two children, should be facing death.

The slam of a gate made her jump. A woman with a baby in her arms was walking up the garden path – a fresh-faced rather pretty young woman, unaware of danger. Here was Miss Ranskill’s job. She ran down the path.

‘You’d better go back!’ she gasped. ‘There’s a bomb in the greenhouse.’

‘Bother!’ said the stranger, stooping down to pick up a woollen bootee. The ejaculation might have referred to the bomb or the bootee. ‘I forgot they generally have one of these incendiary bomb things on Thursdays. I’ll wait till it’s over.’

She plumped herself down under the hedge that divided the garden from its neighbour and began to wriggle the baby’s foot into her bootee.

The bland face of the infant urged Miss Ranskill to protest.

‘Is it safe to sit there?’

‘I always do.’ The young woman patted the grass bank and then looked at her palm. ‘It’s not so damp as all that!’

As well interrupt a coronation to ask if the King’s crown were real, as question this young woman about the liveliness of bombs.

‘If that’s how they all behave, it’s how I’ll have to behave,’ thought Miss Ranskill, trying to affect nonchalance, as she strolled towards the porch where her tools lay scattered.

Now Marjorie, erect once more, rather flushed and with a red mark under her chin where the strap of the helmet had bitten in, was shouting at the bucket-party.

‘I said last time not to stop pumping till I said. If it had been a real bomb we’d have been sunk. Jebb, your tunic isn’t buttoned properly. Sprink, your shoe-lace is untied. You might have tripped and upset the bucket: then where’d we have been if it had been a real bomb?’

No, there was no mistaking Marjorie, the prefect, and Miss Ranskill was thankful she had made no display of her bewilderment.

Miss Jebb jerked a violent salute, and must have hurt her knuckles on the edge of her helmet. Miss Sprink’s salute was elegant and nonchalant. Marjorie’s hand went up smartly and descended without hindrance.

‘Dismiss!’ she shouted, so fiercely that Miss Ranskill dropped the spirit-level.

Marjorie came striding down the path and then paused to dust the gravel from her knees.

‘Marjorie!’ said Miss Ranskill, ‘Marjorie.’

But her old school-friend addressed Miss Jebb.

‘They’ve been pinching the sand again. How are we to win the war if people keep on pinching the ARP sand for their canary cages?’

‘Do you think they’re Fifth Columnists?’ Miss Jebb raised a face so anxious and birdlike that Miss Ranskill thought of a sparrow in a halo.

‘Everyone who gives ARP sand to canaries is a Fifth Columnist in a way.’

‘Marjorie!’ Miss Ranskill raised her voice determinedly, for she had not come to England to listen to chat about sparrows or references to the fifth of the Seven Pillars of Wisdom, if they were what Marjorie was talking about. ‘Don’t you remember me?’

Marjorie furrowed her forehead and looked her old friend up and down.

‘Are you the new salvage person?’ she asked, and not without reason, so Miss Jebb’s tremulous smile informed the visitor.

‘I’m Nona Ranskill. St Catherine’s, you know. I rang up this morning and your husband–’

A crashing slap on the shoulder-blades jerked the sentence to an end.

‘Nona, old thing! Of course, I remember. Harry (just like him) said a Miss Ransome had rung up. Of course I thought it was Kathleen Ransome – that ghastly girl with a sniff. I say, though, you’re looking a bit under the weather or something. And what are you doing with all those tools?’

‘I–’

‘Miss Jebb, Miss Sprink, this is Miss Ranskill, a very old friend of mine. We used to have great times together. She never had a bungie (did you, Nona?), she always borrowed mine. She was a whale at borrowing bungies. I’ll bet you haven’t got one now, have you, Nona?’

‘I–’

‘Well, I’ll see you tonight, Miss Sprink, and you too, Miss Jebb. Don’t be late, will you. I do want our unit to set a good example to all the other fire-watchers.’

Miss Ranskill regarded her spirit-level. Whoever might have stolen the thunder had not left even a rumble for her.

She had travelled a very long way indeed to be introduced as a person who was famous for losing india-rubbers.

Miss Jebb and Miss Sprink made a clattering departure and Miss Jebb added sloppiness to hers because she had not emptied her bucket.

‘I say, don’t you go yet, Nona. I haven’t got long, but we can have a jaw while I’m changing. Come on, I’ll have to look slippy or I’ll be late for camouflage nets.’

Marjorie coiled the serpentine trail of the stirrup-pump round her left arm and led the way into the hall.

The slattern appeared in a doorway. Her trouble-making face had a triumphant expression as she declared there was not a bit of fish in the town and that every slab was as bare as her arm.

‘So I’ll have to open a tin for tonight,’ she concluded.

‘No, we must keep those in case of invasion. Aren’t there some sausages left?’

‘One or two, that’s all.’

‘Well, what about toad-in-the-hole, then? You could make the batter with the rest of that tin of Woolton eggs.’

‘There’s scarcely a drop of milk left.’

‘You can use some of the household milk then. Though we like batter mixed with water: it’s so much lighter.’

A sniff answered Marjorie and she charged upstairs followed by Miss Ranskill.

‘You haven’t asked after the children yet,’ she reproached as she opened a door on the upper landing.

‘I–’

The ringing of a telephone on a bedside table interrupted, and Miss Ranskill flopped down on to a chair as her friend picked up the receiver.