Barbara Todd - Miss Ranskill Comes Home

‘Will you sit down a minute?’ Mrs Amery jerked a chair out of place and sat down on another one. She stared at the fireplace and did not even look at Miss Ranskill as she asked, ‘I suppose you’ve heard something?’

‘I went to the house where – where you used to live, and I was told–’

‘Trust her to talk,’ interrupted Mrs Amery bitterly. ‘All said and done, it was his father’s work-shed, and if he did think he’d a right–’

‘How is Colin?’ asked Miss Ranskill, dreading the answer to direct question less than information given in the belief that she had been listening to gossip.

‘You wouldn’t know him for the same boy since all this. Nobody would.’

‘Is he at home?’

‘No.’ Mrs Amery gave a furtive glance, and said no more.

‘I should have liked to see him again.’

‘He’ll not be in till late – if he’s back at all. I ought to have gone with him, but the doctor said “no”. He wouldn’t hear of it. “Best stay at home, Mrs Amery,” that’s what he said, “best stay at home and let your husband get on with it.” Yes, the doctor knows how I suffer from my nerves.’

‘Then Colin is ill?’

‘It’s me that’s ill. All gone to pieces my nerves are. No wonder neither, after all that I’ve been through. And what his poor Dad would have said.’

‘Where is Colin?’

‘If you must know,’ Mrs Amery dabbed at her eyes, ‘if you must know they’ve taken him to Court.’

For a moment the words conveyed nothing but grandeur to Miss Ranskill, glittering grandeur, soft with feathers, shining with the glint of orders and jewels and swords. Mrs Amery’s next words banished romance.

‘The Juvenile Court at Mallingford.’

‘Oh! poor little boy!’

‘He done it all right,’ said Mrs Amery, and not, perhaps, without a touch of pride. ‘Five charges, petty larceny mostly.’

If Colin was to turn out bad, Miss Ranskill, it would break my heart.

‘He was all right till after the wedding,’ continued Mrs Amery. ‘You couldn’t have found a better boy anywhere – not if you’d looked …. Yes, he was all right till then, but he and his stepfather never did hit it off and it got worse. I suppose I might have taken a bit more notice, but you know what it is when you’re just married. Mr Amery got sick of him mooning about in the evenings and always fiddling with his bits of carpentering. It isn’t as though we’d a shed here. I don’t say Mr Amery wasn’t a bit sharp. Pushing him out of the house and that. I ought to have noticed what was going on, but then, you see, he never brought his friends back home, so how was I to know? I did have one or two complaints, but I didn’t take much notice of them. You know what boys are, you can’t expect them to be angels all the time.’

There followed a long description of Mrs Amery’s nerves, but the visions in Miss Ranskill’s mind spared her from noticing those details. She was looking at the boy’s face and his father’s face: she was looking into the future. Six weeks couldn’t be long enough to make a criminal surely?

‘It’s what’s going to happen next that’s worrying me,’ said Mrs Amery. ‘It’s the idea of the probation officer or the police nosing round that gets me down. Mr Amery says he won’t have it, and you can’t really blame him. They might send him to an approved school, but Mr Amery says that’s not likely; it’s not as though he’d a bad record up to now. He says he’ll not have him back in the house at any price. It is an upset and no mistake.’

‘Would, could–’ Miss Ranskill had made up her mind, and the words came tumbling out. ‘If the magistrates will allow it, will you let the boy come and stay with me for as long – as long as he likes?’

‘I’m sure it’s ever so good of you,’ declared Mrs Amery.

‘I owe his father a debt,’ Miss Ranskill told her, adding hastily as the expression of distress on Mrs Amery’s face turned to one of suspicion, ‘I don’t mean a money debt: he taught me things I shall never forget.’

‘It’s ever so good of you. I don’t see that there’s anywhere else he could go, seeing Mr Amery’s determined he shan’t come back here.’

And now Miss Ranskill was in a hurry to be gone. She asked a few more questions, and learned that it was unlikely that Colin’s case would be heard until after lunch.

‘There are so many cases just now. It’s this dreadful war and the fathers all being away. The boys go about in gangs. One’s as bad as another. The policeman told me that when he said they’d got to make an example of Colin seeing as how he was a leader. Yes, there’ll be a lot of cases on today. There’s young Pyecroft, for instance – now he’s a bad boy if ever there was one – a real bad-hearted boy.’

But Miss Ranskill had not time to listen to the iniquities of young Pyecroft. She asked a few questions, discovered that the coal merchant had a taxi and might be persuaded to drive her into Mallingford, since it was within the nine-mile limit for taxis, said goodbye and let herself out of the front door. The little gang of boys was still lurking and cat-calling by the gate.

The sea-shell was in her pocket. She had taken it as a talisman. His clothes would be sent on.

The little boy sat hunched up in the corner of the third-class carriage. He had scarcely spoken a word through the journey that was very nearly at an end.

The distressing blue light that made war-time travel so melancholy showed Miss Ranskill that his eyes were closed. She did not believe that he was asleep; his eyelids were pressed down too tightly and his lips were too firm. He was defending himself from question and scrutiny; and containing within himself all the horrors of the courtroom – the looming police, the inquisition of the prosecution, the publicity and the inner loneliness.

Miss Ranskill had not witnessed his humiliation but she had seen his face, dour and defiant, before he went into the court; tear-blotched and glum when he came out. She had seen him shrug away when his stepfather had laid hand on his arm, had seen his contemptuous eyes as he listened to the half-jocular, half-bullying words, spoken more for the benefit of the ghoulish onlookers than for the boy himself.

‘Let this be a lesson to you, my lad. I can tell you, you’d have copped it proper if I’d been the Magistrate. You will next time, make no mistake about that. Don’t you look at me in that saucy way neither, as though you fancied yourself a hero, you dirty little sneak-thief, you.’

She had seen him duck his head and look into all the corners of the outer room as though searching for cover.

She, herself, had had an exhausting day. There had been interviews with the Magistrate, another with the Probation Officer, a third with the stepfather, besides formalities that seemed endless. Her own credentials, as a suitable and responsible guardian of the boy, had had to be established. There had been telephone conversations with the doctor in her own village and with old Mr Jelks, the local Magistrate, who had known her since girlhood.

The Probation Officer had been kindly and helpful.

‘We get so many cases like this. From our point of view it is always more difficult when the child does not come from a really bad home. We have more power, when we can prove neglect and can make use of an Approved School. There was neglect in this case, of course, but not physical neglect. The boy is well-nourished and well-clothed. His sort of case is more puzzling to the outsider than it is to us. Here we have a boy with a perfectly good previous record, a fairly quiet, well-mannered boy, who suddenly becomes a little villain, loses all sense of right and wrong, and, when he comes before the Magistrates refuses to say a word that might help him. What has happened? He may have been to too many gangster films. He may have come under the influence of older, more sophisticated boys. He may have had too much love or too little, or his pride may have been hurt so badly that he felt an urge to assert himself and become important to someone. I think that is what happened here. This little boy became the leader of a gang of small hooligans.’