Free Tommy Glover's Sketch of Heaven by Jane Bailey Page A

turning this way and that and smiling at my reflection. It is dinner at teatime today, and I can’t wait to see the surprise on Uncle Jack’s face when he sees how smart I can look. And Aunty Joyce will wish she’d thought of lending them to me sooner.
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    It seems foolish now, I know, but that little eight-year-old simply doesn’t guess. I blunder in there in the full party frock of their dead daughter and wonder why Aunty Joyce drops the runner beans all over the floor and opens her mouth in slow motion and narrows her eyes and lets out the most terrifying howl anyone has ever aimed at me before or since. I wonder why she leaps on me like a mad woman, tears off the cardigan and orders me to “Get it off ! Get it off . You wicked girl!” I wonder why she screams, “How dare you?” so many times, and why Uncle Jack just keeps repeating, “Joyce! Joyce! Joyce!”

Counting ourselves lucky
    There are many stealthy sorrows in Sheepcote. There are those you just chance upon, like George, who drives an imaginary Spitfire down the road and makes the sound of an engine. He is a six-footer with the build of a warrior, but his little head hangs apologetically from his monstrous shoulders, and when the village girls tease him – “D’you wanna go out with us then, George?” – his eyes light up and he nods so credulously it would break your heart.
    Then there are those you’d never guess at, hidden behind the little lace curtains and the stoic Sheepcote faces, sorrows and secrets that only an invisible person at the knitting group can uncover.
    There is Mrs Marsh with the small moustache, whose husband delivers the milk and who’s taken in the evacuee, Babs Sedgemoor. She’s lost two of her three sons in the war, one by a U-boat and one shot down over France, and she’s had no bodies to bury. Her gloves and mittens are perfect, with not a stitch out of place, not a fault in the neat four-ply. Then there’s Mrs Glass with the very fat arse, the butcher’s wife. She can hardly look Mrs Marsh in the eye with two strapping lads, still too young to join up, and lucky as Larry to be safe on Gloucestershire soil and not lifeless on some strange field far from the smell of home. She is so guilty for it you wouldn’t know she forgot to put cold water in the tub some years back and immersed her first-born in a bath of freshly boiled water. The fatal baptism killed her only daughter, and left a furrow on her brow which everyone understands and no one speaks of, at least not while she’s there. “I’m a lucky woman,” she says eagerly, and with a note of apology for her two healthy boys, safer than they should be in the midst of war; but no one really knows what ‘lucky’ is any more.
    But what of Aunty Joyce? I listen eagerly for snippets about her. Often, on a Thursday, she’ll pack me off to the village hall and stay in with Uncle Jack if his shift means he’s home. At least, that’s what she tells Aggie and the others, but I can’t see them having much fun together.
    These are good times for me though, because I’ve learnt that whenever someone is absent, they become the unofficial topic of conversation.
    â€œSee our Joyce is busy again,” starts Mrs Chudd. “Got work up at the farm, ’ave she?”
    â€œJust spending some time with Uncle Jack, I think.”
    â€œOooh?” A mewling of surprise from Mrs Chudd.
    A moment of silence, but Mrs Chudd will not let this one go. “She’s such a pretty thing. I wonder she doesn’t wear make-up any more. Have you noticed? She could look like a film star with a bit of rouge.”
    â€œIt’s Jack as stops her,” says Aggie Tugwell.
    â€œNo!”
    â€œHe does. I heard that ever since … you know … he won’t let her touch the stuff.”
    â€œGet away!”
    â€œTiz true.”
    â€œWell, that don’t