Sacred Country Read Free Page B

she just going to Ipswich or was she going to the Tyrrhenian Sea?
    By Sunday evening, after looking in my mother’s sewing basket and in her button box and in all the crannies of the house where an important thing might have hidden itself and finding nothing, I decided that I couldn’t go to school the next day. I would walk a long way from our farm. I would find a hayfield coming to its second cropping and I would sit in it and think about my coming life as a boy. I would examine myself for signs. Or I might climb a tree and stay there out of reach of everyone and everything, including all the stones in the soil.
    For my mid-day dinner, my mother made me pickle sandwiches and a thermos of lemon squash. In the winter, the thermos had tea in it and the taste of the tea lingered over into the summer and came into the lemon squash, tepid and strange.
    At the bottom of our lane, instead of turning left towards Swaithey and school, I turned right and began to run. I kept running until I was beyond the fields that were ours and then I stopped under a signpost and sat down. It was very hot there, even in that early morning sun. I drank some of my lemon squash. And then after about five minutes I got up and began tearing back the way I had come. I had remembered my precious thing.
    I was late for the class. I had had some trouble on the way with Irene, who said: ‘What are you thinking of, Mary Ward? Whatever are you like?’
    ‘Please, Irene,’ I begged. ‘ Please .’
    I was in Mr Harker’s house, where Irene worked. Mr Harker had turned his cellar into a factory where he made cricket bats. The smell of wood and oil came up into all the rooms. A painted sign on his gate said: Harker’s Bats .
    ‘It’d only be for half an hour,’ I pleaded.
    ‘No,’ said Irene. ‘Now run along to school.’
    But I got her in the end: Pearl, my precious thing.
    I carried her like a big vase with both my arms round her. Miss McRae took her glasses off and frowned and said: ‘Whatever in the world, Mary?’ Lots of children giggled. I opened my desk top and laid Pearl down in my desk with her head on my Arithmetic book. I closed my ears and my mind to everybody laughing.
    Pearl gazed at me. She looked frightened. I don’t suppose she’d ever been in a desk before. I gave her a little wooden ruler to play with but she hit herself on the nose with it and began to cry.
    ‘My, my,’ I heard Miss McRae say, ‘this is very irregular, Mary. Will you tell me please what this baby is doing in my lesson?’
    I had to pick Pearl up to stop her crying. The boy who sat next to me, Billy Bateman, was laughing so hard he asked to be excused. I looked over to his desk and saw that he’d brought in a stamp album, all mutilated and falling apart, as if it had belonged to Noah. When I’m a boy, I thought, I’ll be a more interesting one than him.
    ‘Mary?’ said Miss McRae.
    I felt my heart jump about inside my aertex blouse. I felt thirsty and very peculiarly sad. I thought I might cry, which was a thing I never did, but sometimes you cry with your face and your mind isn’t in it, but somewhere else, watching you. It was like that. It was my face that felt sad.
    The thing was, I didn’t know what to say about Pearl. I didn’t understand why she was important to me, except that I thought she was very beautiful and I still couldn’t see why she hadn’t won that contest.
    I held her awkwardly. When Timmy was born, my mother had tried to show me how to hold a baby, but I’d refused to listen. I thought, I must say something before Pearl slips out of my arms.
    ‘Is this baby your precious thing, Mary?’ asked Miss McRae kindly.
    I nodded.
    ‘I see, dear,’ she said, ‘well in that case, perhaps you will be able to tell the class why?’
    Pearl, at that moment, let her head fall onto my shoulder, as if she wanted to go to sleep and start snoring. Her hand was still on my cheek, holding on to it. I said: ‘Her name’s Pearl. I was going to