Barbara Todd - Miss Ranskill Comes Home

The woman opposite became confidential.

‘I’d a lovely cat at home, orange with a great white ruff,’ she traced the tawny stripes of the smallest kitten with a scarlet fingernail. ‘I had to give him away when I went into digs and started office work. Then I found my landlady would have looked after him for me, and I’ve been kicking myself ever since.’

‘Kitty! Kitty!’ shrilled the child.

‘The very spit of this one,’ repeated the sailor. ‘I wouldn’t mind being a ship’s cat myself. Want to come to sea, do you?’

He addressed the black kitten and Miss Ranskill answered for it.

‘Would you like to have it? If you would I could send it to you as soon as it can leave its mother, if you give me your address. It might be lucky.’

‘What about making a few flights over Germany, eh?’

The airman was questioning the tortoiseshell but the child’s mother reproved him.

‘All very well, but suppose you was shot down, what happens to the kitten then?’

‘I hadn’t thought of that,’ replied the airman humbly.

The man by Miss Ranskill’s side spoke for the first time.

‘We are a truly remarkable people!’ he declared. ‘I have always maintained that if the Speaker kept a supply of puppies to be produced in the House at appropriate moments, the most heated debates would end amicably. In fact, if the Germans were dog-lovers there need have been no war. An International Kennel Club could have done much more than any League of Nations. You, Madam, who can anticipate so glibly the tragedy of a kitten’s death and ignore what to you is, presumably, the minor accident of the loss of a man’s life, prove my point.’

And now, the man in the waterproof took Miss Ranskill’s place as outcast.

The child’s mother sucked her teeth ostentatiously, and muttered, ‘Well, I mean to say, poor dumb animals!’ and turned her offspring’s back on the brutal speaker.

‘Poor little beggar,’ said the airman, as he stroked the kitten under its golden chin.

‘If you was wanting a home for the black one,’ suggested the sailor.

In five minutes, Miss Ranskill had found homes for all the kittens. Three slips of paper, bearing addresses to which they might be sent as soon as they could leave their mother, joined the identity card and ration books in her handbag. Once more she was a person of some consequence, a giver of gifts with a place in society.

The man by her side craned a vulture neck to peer at the huddle of kittens in her lap.

‘A remarkable people,’ he repeated. ‘You, Madam, have probably drunk milkless tea for the last few years and sacrificed your butter ration for the sake of a cat’s paws. You would think it generosity to take meat from the mouth of a child and give it to your lap-dog.’

‘For the last few years,’ Miss Ranskill told him, ‘I have not tasted milk or tea or butter. I’ve robbed gulls’ nests and snatched at the fish they dropped from their mouths whenever they were fools enough to open them.’

And now she was in isolation again, outcast with the man who had no truck with kittens. The females in the carriage looked uncomfortable, the males, except her partner, incredulous.

‘Sounds like a desert island,’ he muttered.

‘It was a desert island.’

Miss Ranskill turned her face to the window but she did not see the rushing landscapes. She was wondering if she would ever be able to remember that her truth was shocking and evidently not to be borne by a people who, though they had suffered air-raids and mutilations, the destruction of their homes and the death of their kin, yet could not bear to hear oddly-timed laughter or statements of facts beyond their immediate knowledge.

Presently the train had swept past the scarred outskirts of Bath and the crowded station, where men and women in every kind of uniform jostled each other like sheep or stood forlornly by kit-bags.

Then there were more ravaged buildings and then little housebound roads thrust themselves out towards the country. At last there were only farms and grey villages with the green of Somerset in between. The lanes, like all lanes seen from train windows, led to nowhere in particular. The houses only existed as pictures for the benefit of travellers. One might as soon live in one of them as inhabit a cottage in a water-colour sketch. The villages were as fantastic as all railway villages are, the children who waved from the sidings had no existence at all, and it was impossible to think of anyone stepping on to one of the wayside platforms in order to go home. Yet there was a difference – there was something lacking, and for a long time Miss Ranskill wondered what it could be.

When, at last, she remembered, she was rather shocked. It was all very well to play the railway game with villages and stations, but they were going a little too far when they began to play back. It was as baffling as though a baby whom you had addressed as ‘there’s a pretty lamb then’ had suddenly leaped on all fours and followed its mother, the sheep.

She forgot her disgrace and spoke urgently.

‘Why have none of the stations got names?’

‘Because,’ said her neighbour at last, ‘because we do not believe that the Hun has learned geography. A few of us have maps of Germany, but we do not believe that there are any maps of this country outside the British Isles. We removed the names from railway stations on the same glad day that we painted the sign-posts white. We decided it would be a good idea for the invading Hun to mistake Huddersfield for London. We thought it would be a joke to hear him sing, “Oh! Mr Porter, whatever shall we do? The Fuehrer’s taken Birmingham and he thinks he’s taken Crewe.”’

‘Oh!’ said Miss Ranskill. ‘Then how?’

‘It’s perfectly easy, really, because the porters bawl out the names. We do not believe that any of the invading Huns will understand English, nor, of course, will the spies. As a matter of fact, none of our porters speak English either – rather a vicious circle, don’t you think?’

The inhabitants of the garden were declaring war and peace in their several ways.

‘Buzinezz as uzual!’ buzzed a bee as it blundered against a spray of lilac before flying down to settle on the velvet of a wallflower, ‘Buzinezz as uzual!’ Its action released two scents, the sharp of the lilac, the soft of the wallflower. Each, as it drifted through the air, maintained for a moment the peace and permanence of village gardens. Then the bee-swung wallflower flicked against a clump of chives that edged the bed so that a stronger fragrance gave a taste of war. The chives stood stiffly for battle, so did the garland of parsley round the rose-bed on the lawn, and so did the seedling lettuces under the windows of the low red cottage. The aviary that had once sheltered budgerigars told a sad empty little story of the famine that had lasted a week too long for short lives.

The thrush on the rockery rapped out a grace with his snail-shell. The wagtail on the lawn flicked an insolent tail. There was nothing wrong with his world, so the tail remarked with frequency.

Even if the swallows had seen untoward sights during their crossing, their arrow flights suggested no mechanised progress since Crécy. A spider arranged its larder between gate and gate-post with the skill used by its ancestors before any child had learned to say ‘Fee-fi-fo-fum’.

The entry of Miss Ranskill caused some stir in the garden. The spider’s web snapped. The thrush left its snail-shell, the wagtail flicked indignation as it left the lawn; and the bees bumped irresolutely from flower to flower, releasing so many tiny gusts of scent that her nose might have been bewildered if she had not been concentrating so hard on seeing.