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To June Spencer and everyone who listens
WINTER 1940
All our songs went up and out the chimney
THOMAS HARDY
At the Entering of the New Year
JANUARY
In a small stone house in the crook of one of England’s elbows, the old year petered out, and a new one was welcomed by a man unsteady on his feet, waving a cup of something strong.
Walter Gabriel rarely saw midnight. But it turned out he liked it just fine, with the fire burning and the parlour full, and a fiddle being tuned. ‘And a happy new year to you all!’ he shouted.
St Stephen’s bell was quiet, stilled by the new war. Instead, his guests counted down the chimes of the old, unreliable grandfather clock in the hall.
‘Twelve! Eleven! Ten!’
In other houses, scattered in the dark, some of Walter’s neighbours were drunk. Most of them were asleep. One snored like a brass band.
‘Five! Four!’
Some sat by hearths. Two argued eloquently. There was love being made in old wooden beds, and up against a cow byre. Whisky was drunk. A dog’s ear was scritch-scratched.
Walter Gabriel sat down. Or toppled, rather. The wooden settle almost gave way, but it held, as the clock struck twelve and Ambridge was new again, a baby, just seconds old.
The moment shimmers.
Walter thinks of his father, dead just two days, another felled oak in the forest.
Across the fields, Kitty Dibden-Rawles hears a creak from the floorboards. She opens her arms to her daughter, three years old and frightened of the dark. Little Caroline’s warm bulk is delicious in the bed. My first turning of the year as a widow, thinks Kitty.
In the yard of The Bull, the landlord’s son leans his hot cheek against the pitted wall and remembers his grandmother telling him how the blind can see in their dreams.
Mrs Endicott, beneath a quilt and a blanket and another quilt, feels the cold and bitterly regrets accepting that barley wine. With her delicate constitution she can’t be too careful and she can already feel it settling on her chest. Will I see another year out?
His doctor’s bag to hand, just in case, Morgan Seed is accustomed to the emptiness of his bed. Mrs Seed died two decades or so ago but he fancies he can still hear her commentary on his habits. Tonight she is silent. Does she disown me for what I did on Friday?
As Dan snores beside her – honestly, it’s too much, the cat has left the room in disgust – Doris Archer tries to sleep. Nineteen forty, with all its spitting anger from abroad, the great vague over there, is a vast wave gathering out at sea. She’s prepared to swim hard.
As she drops off, Doris remembers she can’t swim.
* * *
Nineteen forty was six days old.
Ambridge was in the grip of a freezing January. It had seen many winters, and weathered them all. An unassuming triangle on the map, its ribbon of lanes centred around a green, it was scribbled on by the meandering signature of the river Am. A church, of course, and its vicarage, sat tidily to the south. A pub and a store served the people who lived in the red-brick houses and the squat cottages. Some dwellings were unsteady on their feet, others had the snug, smug look of spoilt children.
As Alec Pargetter made his way through Ambridge he held his head high.
He was the latest of a long line of men who had done so. Tall, angular, with a moustache as genteel as his manner, Alec was bred to feel, not superior, he would never want to be that, but certain of his position.
Like Lower Loxley, the house on higher ground he had inherited along with fallen arches and self-confidence, his position was exalted. The house was stuffy with the log fires and candles demanded by Christmas, and he was taking a brisk turn around the village. His village, his wife called it, but Alec didn’t put it like that.
A drover passed him. Looked twice. Quite rudely, really. Alec passed a protective hand over the blackened skin around his eye, cursing the fellow.
So many new faces about since the war began. Alec commanded respect in Ambridge. He was only keeping Lower Loxley warm for the parade of Pargetters who would come after him. They were a still point in the whirring world; Alec believed that everyone liked it that way.
Swerving by on his ancient bike, the postman dinged his bell at Alec. There was an impertinence to its cheerful noise; Whitey White seemed to approve of Alec’s black eye. The vicar’s wife was so startled by the bruises she forgot to offer one of her mousy hellos.
Kitty, passing him outside the village hall, was somehow comical in her dead husband’s old coat. Her slender neck, sticking out of the outsized collar, looked as if it might snap.
‘Morning,’ said Alec, noticing how she decided not to stare.
Her little girl, wearing two coats, one on top of the other, pointed. ‘Ouch!’ she said.
At the entrance to The Bull, Alec paused. January was proving to be a scathing month, cold and relentless, and the pub radiated warmth and sweaty humanity. He pushed at the door.
The pub was full. All in funereal black, many of them Gabriels, most of them drunk.
‘To Jonjo!’ bellowed Walter. ‘A better father no man ever had!’ He was maudlin, and his feet folded beneath him, making him lurch, like a dresser about to topple.
‘And,’ added a small old woman with not one tooth to call her own, ‘the best blacksmith Ambridge ever knew.’
There were sombre nods at this.
The last blacksmith Ambridge will ever know, thought Alec. The war, that grinding engine, would mechanize the forge and render the Jonjo Gabriels of this world obsolete. In truth, the man had been an indifferent blacksmith, his main virtue being that he was local and therefore handy. Irritable, surly, he was now sanctified by the act of dying.
Even though, thought Alec, we all do that. There was no real skill to it.
Six-year-old Nelson, the great man’s grandson, was under Alec’s feet as he pushed to the bar. ‘Yes, Bob, just matches,’ he said, as the landlord asked if that was all.
‘As you wish, Mr P.’
Alec held the landlord’s gaze. Saw the question in his wince. ‘Ah. Yes. My glorious eye. My own fault. Walked straight into the damn stable door.’
‘That must hurt.’
‘Like the very blazes.’ Alec left, matches in his pocket and a novel feeling in his chest.
For the first time since his father died – and took his riding crop with him – Alec felt humiliated.
* * *
Jane Gilpin gave little Caroline a toffee as Kitty passed her front door. Woodbine Cottage was a small and lovely house, with a thatch that leaned over the porch like great bushy brows.
‘What do you say?’ said Kitty.
The child’s thank-you was mangled by the toffee and the women smiled at each other.
‘You look very smart,’ said Kitty.
‘Do I?’ Jane went pink, and not from the cold. She so rarely received a compliment. This lovely young woman must swim in them, she thought, with that complexion, and a dancing Irish accent to boot. Kitty had noticed the effort Jane had gone to. The touch of illicit rouge. The careful curl of dark hair that nowadays was striped with pewter. ‘Very smart? Goodness,’ said Jane, unsure how to respond to being seen.
‘Off somewhere nice?’ Kitty stamped her feet. Her shoes were thin, not fit for purpose. She knew exactly how many pennies were in her
bank account, and each one was accounted for. Shoes for herself came very low down on a long and crushingly banal list.
‘Only, just to, a visit, a… friend.’ He was more than a friend. He might soon be much more. Jane was proficient in bed baths and crochet, but bad at men, yet even she had noticed a change in the weather around Mr Denholm Kaye. She felt a spring all of her own approaching. She was unfurling. Reaching out timid shoots.
Most of Jane’s metaphors were horticultural; she was known for her hollyhocks.
‘And your sister, is she keeping well?’
‘The same.’ Jane gave a shrug. ‘The same, you know.’
They both looked up at the small window that peeped out of the thatch, like a beady eye under the brow. The face was there, as ever. A pale smudge behind the lace curtain. A hand waved.
Kitty waved back. ‘How,’ she asked Jane, ‘does she manage to keep so cheerful?’
‘Blanche is an example to us all.’ Jane could have been more honest, turn the question around, ask why on Earth wouldn’t Blanche be cheerful when she had a willing and able handmaiden on call day and night? ‘Did you happen to bump into Mr Pargetter?’
‘You mean…’ Kitty gestured to her face. ‘Yes. Poor man.’
‘Probably some silly accident,’ said Jane. She let the statement fall slightly, turn into a hopeful question.
‘Not my business,’ said Kitty, and Jane felt chastened.
* * *
As these women talked – or rather, didn’t talk – of him, Alec stood at the lychgate of St Stephen’s. He only took notice of the church on Sundays, when he had to, but today his name leapt out at him from a fluttering piece of paper pinned to the gate.
He read. He stared. He went very still. A statue of himself. Then he was all action, snatching the paper and balling it in his hand.
The church was lit, the organ wheezing into life. People more devout than Alec had filed into St Stephen’s to celebrate Epiphany. How many of them had noticed and read the careful capitals? Perhaps the note had been ignored, mistaken for one of the vicar’s interminable notices, women’s guff about flowers or tea urns.
It was only when one got closer that the message revealed itself.
DEAR FRIENDS
IT’S ONLY RIGHT THAT THE PEOPLE WHO LIVE IN THE BIG HOUSE SHOULD LOOK DOWN UPON US ALL. SO WHO DARED TO BLACK ALEC PARGETTER’S EYE?
POSSIBLY IT’S SOMEONE WHO KNOWS ALL ABOUT THE GAMES THIS HIGH AND MIGHTY GENT IS PLAYING WITH A CERTAIN LOCAL LADY.
GET WELL SOON, ALEC!
SIGNED
YOUR NEIGHBOUR
Alec hurried away, head down, out of the village.
* * *
The snowdrops had no idea that there was a war on.
They massed in happy white clumps alongside the tracks as Doris Archer awaited the 11.42 at Hollerton Junction. Important though it was to Ambridge, it was a flyspeck of a place, just a single platform. A flyspeck made cheerful by the snowdrops.
The flowers could be envied their innocence, yet Doris found the war hard to find in her daily life. Change had come, small and manifold and significant, but there was no carnage. Bombs had not rained on the village hall, or even on Leicester Square. Alongside the hushed nation she was waiting, as the tinsel memories of Christmas receded and January hit its stride, for the other shoe to drop.
Petty troubles ignored the war; they lacked the manners to take some time off. Doris had agreed with her aunt over Christmas that, yes, ‘something must be done’ about Doris’s mother. The two women, the only relics of the generation above Doris, had shared a house for years, but the arrangement, beneficial to all, had soured.
‘I can’t cope with her, Doris,’ her aunt had said in an urgent whisper. ‘You’ll have to take her in.’
As if Mum’s a stray cat.
With rude speed, the old lady had been handed over. This morning, Doris had left her in the kitchen, with the children. It would probably be fine. She looked at her watch. She tapped her foot. She hoped the train would be on time.
She had left her eldest, Jack, waiting by the farm truck. Doris tried to catch his eye. No luck; he was too busy accepting the slaps on the back his new uniform inspired. The damp-eyed women and the dour older men weren’t to know that so far all the boy had done was march and eat Spam.
‘Tank gunner. Training at Ripon,’ he said in answer to a stranger’s question as he lounged against the truck. He had an apple-shaped face that shone with health, and penny-round hazel eyes. Jack’s was a life without incident; it had made him unimaginative. Perhaps it was that lack of imagination that inspired him to sign up the day war was declared; Jack couldn’t tell you why he did it. He had to, really. That was as far as his thinking went. ‘Well, they’re bloody big,’ he laughed when a fat little woman asked him about tanks. Not that he’d been near one yet.
He joined in with the gossip about the strange letter pinned up on the church board. He had opinions – on this, on everything – and he said he reckoned snooty old Alec Pargetter was too long in the tooth for that type of thing. ‘He must be getting on, like at least forty,’ he said.
Brookfield’s sheepdog sat sagely, tolerating pats on the head but not deigning to fawn. He glanced up at Jack.
‘I know, Glen, we’ve got better things to do than ferry evacuees around. We could be at home, lounging about, but you know my folks. Worthy.’
* * *
The 11.42 was on time as it approached the final curve in the track.
In the Ladies’ Carriage, a passenger lit a match.
‘Don’t mind if I smoke, do ya?’ Dottie Cook’s voice was distilled London; she was, she had already told her companions, from deepest Fulham. ‘Only it’s doctor’s orders. For the baby.’ She patted her tummy; somewhere in her mysterious insides was a two-month-old foetus she had decided was a boy.
‘Don’t mind me,’ said the girl opposite.
‘You could have knocked me down with a feather when I heard I could be evacuated for being in the family way. A nice free holiday! I don’t have to organize a thing. We’re being met by a, whatsit, a billeting manager. Do they do ciggies in the country? I’ve never been to proper countryside before.’ Dottie pulled her thin coat tighter around her shoulders. ‘And how big are cows? I mean, are they like dogs or more like horses?’
‘Dunno,’ said the girl, who looked as if she did know, but didn’t care to discuss it. She looked out of the window at the barren ash tones of winter. ‘This is nowhere,’ she said.
* * *
The black eye was fading. The self-consciousness was not. Alec patted down his hair, a nervous habit his wife liked to chide him for. His hair longed to wave and bounce, but Brylcreem kept it in check. Like his eyebrows, which hung bushy over reticent eyes, his hair was less polite than the well-mannered rest of him.
Since finding the letter, he had avoided the village. There was always someone hanging around the manor he could send down for errands. Lower Loxley ran on a small platoon of people, usually the offspring or grandchildren of earlier platoons.
Now the time had come to run the gauntlet of the village store.
There was no way of knowing how many of his neighbours had read the slur. Jonjo Gabriel’s funeral had ensured a packed house at St Stephen’s; mourners would have filed past it, in and out. He was reduced to relying on their lack of curiosity.
In a village fuelled by chatter, that was risky.
Who the hell wrote the blasted thing? The impudent capital letters gave no clue. Never keen on grey areas, Alec could only hope that if anyone had seen it before he tore it down, they would know it to be preposterous. The accusation would sound outrageous to anyone who knew him. A man like him, a Pargetter, would never risk his social standing for a tawdry little affair.
As if looking in on his own life, he wondered who he was supposed to be having an affair with. There were precious few contenders; this was Ambridge, not Kensington.
Passing Agnes Boundy he tipped his hat. She ignored him, j
ust as a mistress would, in order to throw the gossip hounds off the scent, but it would take mental gymnastics for anyone to believe that Alec and lady’s maid Agnes were lovers. She was a dachshund, he a Great Dane.
Far more obvious a suspect was Nance Brown, who stood in front of her father’s shop, beating the doormat as if it had insulted her. She was unshowy, unadorned, a thoroughly English creature with strawberry cheeks and hair that was no proper colour, and a diffidence that touched Alec’s heart. She smiled at him. It was contained, reserved, as if she had a private smile of higher quality she shared only with intimates.
No, wait, here came perfect casting. Kitty Dibden-Rawles stopped to pass the time of day with Alec. She looked up at the sky and said yes, he was right, they might be in for some rain later. Her looks and her otherness – aren’t the Irish supposed to be racy? – made Kitty the obvious choice for the role.
Until, thought Alec, one recalls that Kitty is the widow of one of my oldest friends, and I am up to my neck in British cement, with a wife and a son and an estate to manage.
Surely, the poison-pen letter would be met with the derision it deserved. Read. Forgotten. He could, Alec felt sure, front out the whole damn business.
* * *
In the clamour of train doors opening and slamming, Doris saw her evacuees. They were easy to spot. The two Perkins boys were standard issue with snotty noses and skinned knees. The older one had gappy teeth, and hair that stood out like a dandelion clock. This was Billy, she learned, and he was ten years old and eighteen days.
On closer inspection the little one, John, was a miniature movie star. Blonde, sparkly-eyed, trembling with feeling, he was more Shirley Temple than Clark Gable; for a second, less than that, Doris thought, I’ll take these two home with me. Their vulnerability almost overrode the fact that her farmhouse was already full of people who needed her.
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