The Grass Was So Green

Green gravel, green gravel, the grass is so green,
The fairest young lady that ever was seen.
I’ll wash you in milk, and I’ll clothe you in silk
And write down your name with a gold pen and ink.

O Sally, O Sally, your true love is dead,
He’s sent you a letter to turn round your head.

Florence Birch came into Moreton Corbet on foot in the early evening, carrying one case in her right hand and a smaller bag over her shoulder. The road was dry, and the hedges had begun to thicken with the first green of spring. There were lambs in the fields, and rooks moved noisily among the trees. She had not been home in three years, but the lanes bent where they had always bent and the same farms stood behind the same walls. None of it helped.

The castle appeared beyond the trees before the village itself. Florence had grown up in its shadow and had never really thought of it as a ruin. The broken Elizabethan walls stood open to the weather, their empty windows framing strips of the sky. As a child, she had accepted its missing roof in the same way she accepted the church tower or the curve of the road. She briefly remembered being in awe of it, then shifted the case into her other hand and walked on.

She reached the green as the light began to change. A group of girls were playing there, hands joined in a ring, dresses moving in the breeze as they turned. The tune reached her first.

Green Gravel.

She had played it herself, though the memory felt borrowed from some other child. The girls moved around the ring and sang in the careless voices children used when they repeated something so often that meaning fell away.

“Green gravel, green gravel, the grass is so green. The fairest young lady that ever was seen. I’ll wash you in milk and I’ll clothe you with silk and I’ll write down your name with a gold pen and ink.”

One girl was named. She turned obediently until she faced away from the circle. Another name. Another girl turned. The ring kept moving.

Florence continued on. Her father’s house stood beyond the green, unchanged in the failing light. She kept her eyes upon its door, though the rhyme followed her all the way there. The door was unlocked. Inside, the house smelled of polish and something baking, and Florence stopped in the hallway because she had expected dust and silence and found neither. A woman appeared from the kitchen, drying her hands on a cloth, and for a moment they looked at one another.

“Miss Birch. You’re here.”

The woman was perhaps fifty, with grey hair pinned tightly back. She wore a plain dress with an apron over it, and her sleeves were pushed to her elbows. Her face was weathered, her expression warm and unsurprised.

“I’m Mrs Higford. I wrote. I don’t know if the letter reached you.”

Florence set down her case. “It did. Thank you. I’m sorry I didn’t reply.”

“There was nothing to reply to. I told you the house was looked after and it is. Your father asked me to keep it until you came home, and I have. The kettle is on. You’ll want tea.”

Florence followed her into the kitchen. The room was clean and warm, and the table was laid with bread and butter, a pot of damson jam and a plate of oatcakes. The whole arrangement was so perfectly domestic that Florence felt she had walked into someone else’s life. Mrs Higford poured the tea and set a cup in front of her, then sat down opposite with her own. The ease of it all was almost unbearable.

“He went peacefully,” Mrs Higford said. “I know they say that when it isn’t true, but in his case it was. I washed and dressed him myself. He looked very well at the end. Very calm.”

“Thank you,” Florence said. The words felt like a formality, and she meant them as one. She had spent three years thanking people for things you couldn’t really thank them for. She had thanked surgeons for amputations, and orderlies for carrying the dead. The grammar of gratitude in wartime had nothing to do with feelings, though.

“He talked about you,” Mrs Higford continued. “Every day nearly. He kept all your letters in the bureau, and he read them often. He was very proud of what you did.”

Florence drank her tea and said nothing. Through the kitchen window she could hear the children on the green. Mrs Higford glanced towards the sound and her face softened. “They always start up again in spring. The moment the evenings stretch. You can set a clock by it.”

“I remember,” Florence said.

“Your father liked hearing them. Even at the end, when he couldn’t get out of bed, he’d ask me to open the window so he could listen. He said it sounded the same as it always had.”

Florence looked at the woman across the table. Mrs Higford buttered a piece of bread, her face showing nothing except the satisfaction of a task done correctly, while the singing continued outside. “He was right. It does sound the same. It sounded the same when I was a girl, and it sounds the same now. The children change, but the song doesn’t. That’s a comfort, I think.”

“I wrote everything down,” Mrs Higford said. “What the doctor said, what he ate, when he slept and when he didn’t. Dates and so on. I thought you’d want to know.”

She reached into her apron pocket, brought out a folded piece of paper, and placed it on the table beside Florence’s cup. “There’s no hurry. It’s all there when you’re ready.”

Mrs Higford stayed another half hour. She showed Florence where things were kept, though Florence already knew. The linen in the upstairs cupboard, the coal in the shed, the key to the back door hanging on a nail behind the pantry door. She had maintained the house with a thoroughness that went beyond duty. The brasses were polished. The windows were clean. Florence’s father’s coat still hung from the peg beside the front door, and his walking stick stood in the corner. Mrs Higford had not moved either of them. She had cleaned around them.

“I’ll come in the morning,” Mrs Higford said at the door. “We can go through the papers together. There are things I kept aside for you, letters and so forth. Nothing urgent.”

“You’ve been very kind. I’m grateful,” Florence said.

Mrs Higford paused. The green was still visible behind her, and the number of children had dwindled to three or four, but the singing went on.

“That one there,” Mrs Higford said, nodding towards a girl at the edge of the ring. “Beryl Anslow. She has the sweetest voice. She’ll keep them going until they’re called in.”

Florence looked. The girl was small and fair-haired, singing with her face tipped upward and her eyes half closed, as though the song were passing through her rather than coming from within.

“Goodnight, Miss Birch. I’m glad you’re home.”

Mrs Higford walked away across the green, and Florence watched her go, passing the children without remark. Florence closed the door. The house was quiet now except for the muffled singing outside and the small sounds of a house settling into evening. She stood in the hallway and felt the strangeness of being alone in a place that was now hers. Mrs Higford’s presence lingered in the order of things. The swept floor, the folded cloth and the washed cup left upside down on the draining board. The woman had lived there, slept there, and sat by the fire. She had wound the clock, listening to the same singing through the same glass while Florence’s father weakened and died in the room above.

Florence went to the bureau. The letters were there as Mrs Higford had said, bundled and tied with string. Her father’s letters to her, or copies of them, and beneath them her own letters returned, all of them, every one, arranged by date and opened carefully along one edge. She took out one of her own and read a few lines. She had told him about a crossing, about the cold, about a matron who frightened everyone. She put it back. She did not need to read them. She knew what they contained, and she remembered what she had left out. She had stopped describing wounds, fear, anything that might make him sit alone at the kitchen table and picture her among the dying.

He had kept them all.

At the bottom of the drawer was a folded programme printed on yellowing paper. A village fete, 1898. Races. Cakes. Tug of war. Children’s games. Florence ran her finger down the list and stopped at Green Gravel. Something had been written beside it in pencil, in a child’s uncertain hand.

Florence.

She left the programme on the table and went to the parlour window. The green was empty. The light was almost gone, and beyond the roofs and hedges the broken walls of the castle loomed. She stood there and thought of a boy in France. She had not thought of him in months. He had arrived with a wound that did not seem the worst in the ward, which was why she had believed there was time. By the time she returned to him, his skin had changed, and he was repeating something, a few sounds over and over. Florence had bent closer but could not make out a word of it. She had thought it a prayer, or a name, or some scrap of a song from home. All she could do for him was hold his hand and listen. He had died with those sounds on his lips, and she had never known what they were.

Then the singing returned. It came from outside, too faint at first to make out words. Florence did not move. The tune was unmistakable. She listened for footsteps, for laughter, for the sound of children who had crept back to the grass after dark. Nothing followed. She could see its whole breadth through the glass, yet nothing moved upon it.

Presently the words became clear. The familiar promise of milk and silk and the name written down with a gold pen and ink. The verse ended and began again, and this time another name entered it. Her own.

Florence.

And then the instruction.

Turn.

Florence stood at the window with her hand on the curtain, the rhyme running through her, and understanding suddenly landed. She heard the verse again. I’ll wash you in milk. Mrs Higford’s hands, reddened and practical, drying themselves on a cloth.

I washed and dressed him myself.

I’ll clothe you in silk.

He looked very well at the end.

I’ll write down your name with a gold pen and ink. Mrs Higford reaching into her apron pocket.

I wrote down everything. Dates and so on.

The folded paper placed beside the teacup. Your true love is dead.

He went peacefully.

Every line. Every verse. Mrs Higford had performed them all, not as incantation but as housekeeping, as the ordinary work of a woman tending a man through his death in a Shropshire village. She had washed him and dressed him and written it all down and sent the letter to Florence telling her that the person who loved her most was gone, and she had done it with the same calm she brought to buttering bread, because it was not a ritual to her. It was simply what was done. It was what the song was for. The children learned it on the green so that, when their time came, they would know the steps, and Mrs Higford had learned it fifty years ago, then followed it to the letter.

Florence looked at the fete programme on the table. Her name in pencil. 1898. She had been in the ring, sung the names, and turned when she was told. In France she had washed the dying, dressed them, written their names on tags and held their hands while they went. She had never once thought of Green Gravel, because it was already part of her. The song had taught her its steps as a child, and her hands had known them in the wards without being told.

The boy. The rhythm on his lips. She had bent close, listened, and not understood. But she understood now. He had been trying to sing it. Wherever he had come from, the song had been in him too, and it had come back at the end because it was the last thing left, the oldest thing, the thing the body remembered when the mind was gone.

Florence picked up the programme, walked through the hallway and opened the front door. She paused, and then stepped outside.

The air was cold and damp, and the grass stretched before her. Nothing moved. The singing had stopped. Across the green, beyond the road, a light burned in Mrs Higford’s cottage window. The curtain was open, and the lamp was lit. Mrs Higford was just standing there, perfectly still, behind the glass. Florence marched forward and stood on that ground where she had played as a girl, where her name had been sung, and where the game had told her to turn.

She had carried matches in France. Every nurse had. You struck them in the dark when the lamps ran out, and the wounded were calling, and there was nothing else. She took the half-empty box from her coat pocket, took one out and struck it, all the while keeping her gaze fixed on Mrs Higford. The flame caught and trembled, but Florence held it to the corner of the fete programme and watched it take. The paper was old and dry, and it burned quickly, the edges curling, the pencilled names darkening and vanishing. Florence held it until the heat reached her fingers, then dropped it onto the green.

It burned on the grass in a small bright circle.

Mrs Higford had not moved. Her hand was raised against the glass, and her expression was impossible to read from that distance, but Florence knew this was something Mrs Higford had never expected to see.

The paper burned down to nothing, leaving a scorch mark on the grass. Florence turned and walked back to the house. She went inside, closed the door and stood in the hallway. She did not know if it was enough. She did not know if a name could be unwritten by burning the paper it was written on, but she had done it. She had refused the turning. She had taken her name out of the game by the only means the game itself had given her, and she had done it on the green, in the open, where Mrs Higford could see.

Florence sat down at the kitchen table where Mrs Higford had poured her tea an hour before, and she listened to the silence.

Outside, the green said nothing.

I welcome polite comments. If you enjoyed this tale, you might also enjoy Counting Out