Sacred Country - Couverture souple

CHAPTER ONE: 1952
THE TWO-MINUTE SILENCE
On February 15th, 1952, at two o'clock in the afternoon, the nation fell silent for two minutes in honour of the dead king. It was the day of his burial.
Traffic halted. Telephones did not ring. Along the radio airwaves came only hushed white noise. In the street markets, the selling of nylons paused. In the Ritz, the serving of luncheon was temporarily suspended. The waiters stood to attention with napkins folded over their arms.
To some, caught on a stationary bus, at a loom gone suddenly still, or at a brass band rehearsal momentarily soundless, the silence was heavy with eternity. Many people wept and they wept not merely for the king but for themselves and for England: for the long, ghastly passing of time.
On the Suffolk farms, a light wet snow began to fall like salt.
The Ward family stood in a field close together. Sonny Ward had not known -- because the minute hand had fallen off his watch -- at what precise moment to begin the silence. His wife, Estelle, hadn't wanted them to stand round like this out in the grey cold. She'd suggested they stay indoors with a fire to cheer them and the wireless to tell them what to do, but Sonny had said no, they should be out under the sky, to give their prayers an easier route upwards. He said the people of England owed it to the wretched king to speak out for him so that at least he wouldn't stammer in Heaven.
So there they were, gathered round in a potato field: Sonny and Estelle, their daughter, Mary, and their little son, Tim. Pathetic, Sonny thought they looked, pathetic and poor. And the suspicion that his family's silence was not properly synchronised with that of the nation as a whole annoyed Sonny for a long time afterwards. He'd asked his neighbour, Ernie Loomis, to tell him when to begin it, but Loomis had forgotten. Sonny had wondered whether there wouldn't be some sign -- a piece of sky writing or a siren from Lowestoft -- to give him the order, but none came, so when the hour hand of his watch covered the two, he put down his hoe and said: "Right. We'll have the silence now."
They began it.
The salt snow fell on their shoulders.
It was a silence within a silence already there, but nobody except Mary knew that its memory would last a lifetime.
Mary Ward was six years old. She had small feet and hands and a flat, round face that reminded her mother of a sunflower. Her straight brown hair was held back from her forehead by a tortoiseshell slide. She wore round glasses to correct her faulty vision. The arms of these spectacles pinched the backs of her ears. On the day of the silence she was wearing a tweed coat too short for her, purple mittens, Wellingtons and a woollen head scarf patterned with windmills and blue Dutchmen. Her father, glancing at her blinking vacantly in the sleet, thought her a sad sight.
She had been told to think about King George and pray for him. All she could remember of the king was his head, cut off at the neck on the twopenny stamp, so she started to pray for the stamp, but these prayers got dull and flew away and she turned her head this way and that, wondering if she wasn't going to see, at the edge of her hopeless vision, her pet guineafowl, Marguerite, pecking her dainty way over the ploughed earth.
Estelle, that very morning, had inadvertently sewn a hunk of her thick black hair to some parachute silk with her sewing machine. She had screamed when she saw what she'd done. It was grotesque. It was like a crime against herself. And though now, in the silence, Estelle made herself be quiet, she could still hear her voice screaming somewhere far away. Her head was bowed, but she saw Sonny look up, first at Mary and then at her. And so instead of seeing the dead king lying smart in his naval uniform, she saw herself as she was at that precise moment, big in the flat landscape, beautiful in spite of her hacked hair, a mystery, a woman failing and failing through time and the fall endless and icy. She put her palms together, seeking calm. "At teatime," she whispered, "I shall do that new recipe for flapjacks." She believed her whispering was soundless, but it was not. Estelle's mind often had difficulty distinguishing between thoughts and words said aloud.
Sonny banged his worn flat cap against his thigh. He began to cough. "Shut you up, Estelle!" he said through the cough. "Or else we'll have to start the silence again."
Estelle put her hands against her lips and closed her eyes. When Sonny's cough subsided, he looked down at Tim. Tim, his treasure. Timmy, his boy. The child had sat down on a furrow and was trying to unlace his little boots. Sonny watched as one boot was tugged off, pulling with it a grey sock and revealing Timmy's foot. To Sonny, the soft foot looked boneless. Tim stuck it into the mud, throwing the boot away like a toy.
"Tim!" hissed Mary. "Don't be bad!"
"Shut you up, girl!" said Sonny.
"I can't hear any silence at all," said Estelle.
"Begin it again," ordered Sonny.
So Mary thought, how many minutes is it going to be? Will it get dark with us still standing here?
And then the idea of them waiting there in the field, the snow little by little settling on them and whitening them over, gave Mary a strange feeling of exaltation, as if something were about to happen to her that had never happened to anybody in the history of Suffolk or the world.
She tried another prayer for the king, but the words blew away like paper. She wiped the sleet from her glasses with the back of her mittened hand. She stared at her family, took them in, one, two, three of them, quiet at last but not as still as they were meant to be, not still like the plumed men guarding the king's coffin, not still like bulrushes in a lake. And then, hearing the familiar screech of her guineafowl coming from near the farmhouse, she thought, I have some news for you, Marguerite, I have a secret to tell you, dear, and this is it; I am not Mary. That is a mistake. I am not a girl. I'm a boy.
This was how and when it began, the long journey of Mary Ward.
It began in an unsynchronised silence the duration of which no one could determine, for just as Sonny hadn't known when to begin it, so he couldn't tell when to end it. He just let his family stand out there in the sleet, waiting, and the waiting felt like a long time.

THE BEAUTIFUL BABY CONTEST
In April that year, Sonny lost eleven lambs to freezing weather. Anger always made him deaf. The more angry he grew, the louder he shouted.
Part of his left ear had been shot off in the war. He'd seen a small piece of himself floating away on the waters of the Rhine. What remained was a branching bit of cartilage, like soft coral. In his deaf rages, Sonny would gouge at the coral with his thumb, making blood run down his neck.
Sonny took the frozen lambs to his neighbour, Ernie Loomis, to be butchered and stored in his cold room. On Sonny's farm nothing was allowed to go to waste. And he couldn't bear the way Estelle was becoming careless with things in the house, so absent-minded about everything that sometimes she forgot what she was holding in her hands. He wanted to hit her when this happened, hit her head to wake her thoughts up. That day when she'd sewn her hair to the piece of silk, he'd made her unpick the seam, stitch by stitch with a razor blade, until all the hair was out.
In a silver frame on the kitchen mantelpiece Estelle kept a photograph of her mother. She had been a piano teacher. The photograph showed her as she'd been in 1935, a year before her sudden death in a glider. She had belonged to the Women's League of Health and Beauty and this was how she remained in Estelle's mind -- healthy, with her hair wavy and gleaming, beautiful with a gentle smile. "Gliders, you know," Estelle had once told Mary in the whispery voice she used when she talked about her mother, "are also, in fact, very beautiful things." And it was suggested to Mary, even after she began wearing her glasses, that she had some of Grandma Livia's looks. "I think," Estelle would murmur, "that you will grow up to be quite like her."
Mary was fond of the photograph of her grandmother. She looked quiet and peaceful and Mary was fairly sure she hadn't said thoughts out loud. And when she thought about her death in the glider, she didn't imagine it crashing into a wood or plummeting down onto a village; she dreamed of it just drifting away into a white sky, at first a speck, white on white, then merging into the sky, dissolving and gone. But she had never been able to imagine herself growing up to be like Grandma Livia. She knew she would not become beautiful or join the Women's League, whatever a Women's League might be. And after the day of the two-minute silence, she knew she would not even be a woman. She didn't tell her mother this and naturally she didn't tell her father because since the age of three she had told him nothing at all. She didn't even tell Miss McRae, her teacher. She decided it was a secret. She just whispered it once to Marguerite and Marguerite opened her beak and screeched.
After the death of the lambs, some warm weather came. In May, the community of Swaithey held its annual fete in a field outside the village, well shaded by a line of chestnut trees. These fetes always had as their main attraction a competition of some sort: Best Flower Arrangement, Child's Most Original Fancy Dress, Largest Vegetable, Most Obedient Dog, Most Talented Waltzer and Quickstepper. Prizes were generous: a dozen bottles of stout, a year's subscription to Radio Fun or Flix, a sack of coal. This year there was to be a competition to find Swaithey's Most Beautiful Baby. Entry coupons were threepence, the prize unknown.
Estelle's faulty imagination was tantalised by the idea of an unknown prize. The word "unknown" seemed to promise something of value: a visit to the Tower of London, a Jacqmar scarf, a meeting with Mr. Churchill. She had no baby to enter, yet she refused to let this precious unknown elude her altogether. She bought an entry coupon and took it to her friend, Irene Simmonds.
Irene lived alone with her illegitimate baby, Pearl. The father had been Irish and worked "in the print" in Dublin. "He tasted of the dye," Irene had told Estelle, but the taste quickly faded and was gone and no word, printed or otherwise, came out of Dublin in answer to Irene's letters. She was a practical woman. She had an ample smile and a plump body and a heart of mud. For a long time, she dreamed of the Irish printer but her dreams never showed. All that showed was her devotion to Pearl.
When Estelle came with the threepenny coupon, Irene was feeding Pearl. Her white breasts were larger than the baby's head. They could have nourished a tribe. Pearl's little life was lived in a sweet, milky oblivion.
Estelle sat down with Irene and put the entry ticket on the kitchen table. "The unknown," she said, "is always likely to be better."
Irene filled out the coupon, in the careful handwriting she'd perfected to try to win the printer's devotion: Entrant: Pearl Simmonds, Born April the 22nd, 1951. While she did this, Estelle took Pearl on her lap and looked at her, trying to imagine herself as a judge of Swaithey's Most Beautiful Baby. Pearl's hair was as pale as lemonade. Her eyes were large and blue and liquid. Her mouth was fine like Irene's, with the same sweetness to it. "You must win, cherub," Estelle instructed Pearl, "our hopes are on you."
Sonny refused to go to the fête. He had no money to spare on trifles, no time to waste on fancy dress of any kind.
Estelle went in the pony cart with Mary and Tim. It was a hot day, a record for May, the wireless said. The lanes were snowy with Damsel's Lace. Mary wore a new dress made from a remnant and hand-smocked by Estelle. In the pony cart she began to detest the feel of the smocking against her chest and kept clawing at it.
They stopped at Irene's cottage. Pearl was sleeping in a wicker basket, wrapped in her white christening shawl. They laid the basket on some sacks that smelled of barley. After a bit, Pearl began to snore. Mary had never heard anyone snore except her father, let alone a baby.
"Why is she?" Mary asked Irene.
"Oh," said Irene, "she's always been a snorer, right from the off."
Mary knelt down in the cart and looked at Pearl. The snoring entranced her so, it took her mind off the smocking.
The Beautiful Baby Contest was to be held in a large green tent, ex-army. The mothers would line up on hard chairs and hold their babies aloft as the judges passed. From thirty-six entrants, five would be selected for a second round. There would be one winner and four consolation prizes. All the way there in the cart, Estelle thought about the word "consolation" and how she didn't like it at all. Things which promised to console never did any such thing.
The afternoon grew hotter and hotter, as if all of June and July were being crammed into this single day. At the tombola Estelle won a chocolate cake which began to melt, so she told Mary and Tim to eat it. There was no breeze to make the home-made bunting flutter.
Towards two o'clock, Irene took Pearl to the shade of the chestnuts to give her a drink of rosehip syrup and to change her nappy. Mary asked to go with her. The heat and the smocking had made her chest itch so much she had scratched it raw and now little circles of blood were visible among the silky stitches. She wanted to show Irene these blood beads. Being with Irene was, for Mary, like being inside some kind of shelter that you'd made yourself. It was quiet. Nobody shouted.
Irene examined the blood on the smocking. She undid Mary's dress and bathed the scratches with the damp rags she carried for cleaning up Pearl.
"There's hours of work in smocking, Mary," Irene said.
"I know," said Mary.
They said nothing more. Irene fastened the dress again, kneeling by Mary on the cool grass. She held her shoulders and looked at her. Mary's glasses were dirty and misted up, her thin hair lay damp round her head like a cap. Irene understood that she was refusing to cry. "Right," she said, "now we have to get Pearl ready to be beautiful."
She handed Mary a clean square of white towelling and Mary laid it carefully on the grass. She smoothed it down before she folded it. Irene took off Pearl's wet nappy and laid Pearl on the clean folded square. She took out of her bag a tin of talcum and powdered Pearl's bottom until the shiny flesh was velvety and dry. Mary watched. There was something about Pearl that mesmerised her. It was as if Pearl were a lantern slide and Mary sitting on a chair in the dark. Mary took off her glasses. Without them, it seemed to her that there were two Pearls, or almost two, lying in the chestnut shade, and Mary heard herself say a thought aloud, like her mother did. "If there were two," she said to Irene, "then there would be one for you and one for me."
"Two what, Mary?"
But Mary stopped. She attached her glasses to her ears. "Oh," she said, "I don't know what I meant. I expect I was thinking about the cake Mother won, because you didn't eat any."
"It's hot," said Irene, fastening the safety pin of Pearl's nappy. "It's going to be sweltering in that tent."

The mothers crowded in. There were far more mothers than chairs, so some had to stand, faint from the burning afternoon and the weight of the babies. The judges' opening remarks could hardly be heard above the crying. Lady Elliot from Swaithey Hall, neat in her Jacqmar scarf, said she had never seen such a crowd of pretty tots. She said: "Now I and my fellow judges are going to pass among you and on our second passing we will give out rosettes to the final five."
There was laughter at the idea of the rosettes. The babies were hushed by this sudden ripple of nois...

From the author of The Gustav Sonata

At the age of six, Mary Ward, the child of a poor farming family in Suffolk, has a revelation: she isn't Mary, she's a boy. So begins Mary's heroic struggle to change gender, while around her others also strive to find a place of safety and fulfilment in a savage and confusing world.

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