Daisychain Summer

  ‘It does. And I do understand, truly I do. The war did a lot of cruel things to people who loved each other and –’

  ‘More champagne?’ He lifted the bottle from the cooler. ‘And are you satisfied, now, that you and I can enjoy each other’s company without fear of – complications, shall we say?’

  ‘We can, Mark. And bless you for understanding and for being so tactful about everything,’ she smiled. ‘And I didn’t mean to be nosey or even to warn you off. Oh, dammit! Yes, I was trying to tell you that I’m in love with Andrew, still, and I never thought –’

  ‘Julia,’ he smiled. ‘It is all right! So let’s make a pact? When we are together, there’ll be no mention of what happened to either of us; that for just a little while, we’ll neither of us fret about what happened in the past? And meantime, I think we should talk about getting you both back safely to Rowangarth before the trouble starts – because there will be trouble. Lord knows how long it’s going to last, but I’m afraid there’ll be no avoiding it.’

  ‘Then will you look in on Sparrow, occasionally, to see that she’s all right – especially if the telephones are affected and I can’t get through to her?’

  ‘I’ll make sure Sparrow doesn’t come to any harm, I promise you. So finish your drink, my dear Julia, before it gets warm and flat – then I’ll take you home.’

  On the first day of May the Trades Union Congress declared their support for the coal miners, angrily condemning the commission which recommended they should accept a cut in their hourly rate.

  Not a penny off the pay! Not a minute on the day! became the battlecry.

  The following day the striking miners were joined by gas and electricity workers; building sites closed. That day, Julia sent a telegram to Alice, telling her they had reached Rowangarth. Letter follows, it ended, though if ever that letter reached her could well be a matter of luck.

  ‘It’s bad, isn’t it?’ Alice whispered, placing the small yellow envelope behind the mantel clock. They were waiting for the evening news bulletin; the wireless at least gave out the truth impartially. Soon, Tom said, there might be no newspapers. Even if printers didn’t join the strike, it was only a matter of time before the transport unions came out in support so there’d be little point in newspapers if there was no way to get them to the newsagents. Best stick to the wireless, Tom said, all at once grateful that electricity had not reached Keeper’s Cottage and that they had lamp oil and candles to last for a month.

  ‘Surely the government will make sure that the broadcasting people don’t go on strike.’ Stood to sense, didn’t it. ‘At least they’ll be able to tell people what to do if things get out of hand.’ The new-fangled wireless sets were at last proving their worth.

  ‘And will they,’ Alice whispered, ‘get out of hand?’

  ‘Lord knows. But there’ll be nobody at Windrush going on strike, even though the boss said that anyone wanting to withdraw his labour is free to do so. But nobody’ll bother. Mr Hillier sides with the miners, and that’s good enough for us.

  ‘You know we’re having a collection for them? We asked if it was all right and Mr Hillier said that however much we gathered together, he’d ten-times it, and see that it got to the people who need it most!’

  ‘So things should be safe enough, here at Windrush?’ Alice pleaded, desperate for comfort.

  ‘Safer than most. We’re out of the way, here. You could drive past the lane end and never know this estate exists. We might get a bit short of food, though …’

  ‘But we’ve got potatoes and onions and carrots in the shed, and I bought in extra flour and lard and a few tins – as many as I could afford. But Polly,’ Alice frowned, ‘lives from hand to mouth. There’ll be little in her store cupboard.’

  ‘They won’t go hungry at Willow End. What we’ve got, we’ll share.’

  ‘If it happens, Tom …’ Still, Alice grasped at straws.

  ‘It’ll happen. It’s Them against Us; the rich against the working man. Like it was in the war, I reckon – those men in London giving their orders and not giving a damn what became of the men in the trenches …’

  ‘But in the war we helped each other, Tom. Julia is gentry, yet she rolled up her sleeves like a good ’un!’

  ‘Miss Julia’s different. But there’s going to be a confrontation, only this time They are going to have to take notice.’

  ‘Tom Dwerryhouse, you’re a Bolshevik! If most folk thought like you there’d be a revolution here, like in Russia!’

  ‘And happen there could be and never forget it, lass! Any road, I’m for the miners. My dad dug coal till a roof fall lamed him.’

  ‘And so did Andrew’s father. Julia is on our side, even though she belongs to Them.’

  ‘Like I said, Julia’s different. Now hush your worrying and turn up the volume. I want to hear what the wireless has to say about it.’

  Alice closed her eyes. She didn’t want to hear that her lovely, contented world was threatened. It was the war come back again, only this time it could be Briton fighting Briton, just as it had been in Russia, nearly ten years ago.

  The disembodied voice announced in clear, unemotional tones that from midnight, railwaymen, dockers and drivers, printers and engineers were to support the miners. Trains, buses, food deliveries and newspapers would all be disrupted; gas and electricity supplies affected.

  Alice reached for Tom’s hand. Now she was very afraid; soon, the country would be in turmoil. Tomorrow, when May was but three days run, most workers, though they could ill afford it, would side with the miners. The country would come to a chaotic standstill.

  All at once she could stand no more of the carefully modulated voice. Quietly she left the room, her whole body shaking, to stand at Daisy’s bedside.

  Little lass – forgive us our foolishness? This was the England Robert and Giles and Andrew had died for; aye, and Jinny Dobb’s nephews and millions of young, straight men. This was the country that was to have been a fit place for a hero to return to. But don’t worry, Daisy. Dada will take care of us …

  On the next day, the General Strike was complete. May, the most beautiful and hopeful of months, when winter was gone, when green leaves unfurled and bluebells grew thickly and buttercups glowed golden in the meadows, saw Britain at war again – with itself.

  Volunteers who had no time for trades unions banded together to keep essential services open. They tried to deliver milk, letters, food to the shops. Some donned steel helmets, legacies from the trenches, and drove buses for those who wished to go to work or those, fearful for their jobs in a country where unemployment loomed large, who thought it politic to make the effort to get there. In cities and towns, fighting broke out between strikers and strike-breakers with the police, truncheons flailing, keeping order as best they could. The government, alarmed at the threat of anarchy, called an emergency Cabinet meeting.

  ‘There’s one good thing about this awful mess,’ said Cook, who’d declared there would be no striking in Rowangarth kitchen since Lady Helen was the best of employers, ‘there are no dratted newspapers!’

  During the war years papers had been dreaded, though read from end to end as a painful, patriotic duty.

  ‘Maybe not,’ Tilda countered darkly, ‘but bad news travels fast, for all that. There were some tramcar drivers in Leeds wouldn’t join the strike and crowds pelted them with lumps of coal!’

  ‘And who told you that?’ Mrs Shaw demanded sharply.

  ‘It was Will,’ Mary defended. Will Stubbs still had a liking for other people’s business and an ability to be uncannily accurate into the bargain. ‘There was a train held up at a level crossing near York. There were strike-breakers driving it – trying to get milk through. People threw stones at it!’

  ‘Never!’ Cook could not accept that folk hereabouts could be capable of such violence. In cities, happen, where living conditions were far from ideal, but not in Holdenby; oh, surely not?

  ‘Will says,’ Mary persisted, ‘that a few o
f the mills are trying to work, but their stocks of coal are almost gone.’

  ‘Well, I’m going to Creesby tonight,’ Tilda announced defiantly. ‘At least the picture house is open.’

  Strikers had turned a blind eye to the cinemas. They were places in which entire communities could gather; in which the great majority who did not own a wireless set could watch the newsreels and cheer on their fellow strikers. Or loudly boo those whose conscience demanded they should side with the employers; consciences, or fast-emptying pockets, that was.

  ‘You’ll do no such thing, Tilda Tewk! Lord only knows what might happen to you on the way there, and it’ll be a six-mile ride back – and no street lamps! This house’ll be locked and bolted at sunset, Miss Clitherow’s orders, so you’ll find yourself shut out in the cold, all night!’

  ‘Like them poor miners are locked out at the colliery gates,’ Tilda sniffed.

  ‘They’m not locked out! They chose to strike,’ Cook argued hotly, ‘though I reckon I’d starve afore I’d go down one of them deep, dark holes!’

  ‘What do they mean by anarchy?’ Tilda, robbed of her evening in the cosy darkness, demanded petulantly. ‘This news-sheet says there’ll be anarchy, if folk don’t support the government.’

  News-sheets, hastily printed by non-striking newspapers, warned of anarchy – or even worse – if men and women did not recover their lost senses and return to work, for worse than anarchy was the threat of empty bellies and hungry bairns!

  ‘Anarchy,’ Mary supplied, ‘is another word for revolution. Like they had in Russia.’

  Will had said so. Will pedalled off on his bicycle to Creesby on his free nights, sniffing out gossip instead of courting her like he ought to! Mary Strong was already heartily sick of the strike.

  ‘Revolution?’ Cook whispered. Revolution in England? The King and Queen and all the royalty taken out and shot and the gentry fleeing to France, their homes taken over by workers? It didn’t bear thinking about!

  She sat herself firmly in the fireside rocker, pulled her apron over her face and wept, just as she had done in the war when things had got beyond bearing.

  Mary and Tilda exchanged glances, tiptoed to the back door, then made for their bicycles, determined to prove for themselves the truth of Will’s claims. Loyal to her ladyship they might be, but anarchy bore an exciting ring and they wanted to experience it for themselves.

  ‘We’ll be locked out,’ said Tilda, dramatically.

  ‘Don’t care.’ Mary knew, anyway, where to find the broken catch on a downstairs window.

  ‘Miss Clitherow’ll go on something awful.’

  ‘Let her!’ Mary had spent the war years in a munitions factory in Leeds and had a fair bit of brass tucked away in the bank. Mary was not so intimidated by her betters.

  ‘But what if her ladyship rings?’

  ‘Then let old Clitherow answer it. Me and you are on strike an’ all for a couple of hours, Tilda. And Cook’s in such a tizzy she’ll never notice we’re gone.’

  Cook dried her eyes on her apron, set the kettle to boil, then turned on the wireless set. The government, said the announcer, had declared a state of emergency and tomorrow, on the fourth day of the strike, the Attorney General would announce his deliberations on its legality.

  A state of emergency, and the law coming into it, an’ all. It was altogether too much. Cook ignored the boiling kettle and retreated once more into the folds of her pinafore.

  Revolution, that’s what, and in England!

  Five days from its commencement, the Attorney General pronounced the strike to be illegal and that workers could be sued for their part in it. One by one, the unions abandoned the miners. For just eight days, open rebellion had blazed furiously, then died in ignominy. It had not been so much the threat of a court appearance that sent men back to work, but the sobering thought of a wife demanding a pay packet that was not forthcoming. You couldn’t feed hungry bairns, they said, on hot air. Only the miners stubbornly continued to strike. Let them, reasoned the mine owners. Empty heads would lead, in the end, to empty bellies.

  Yet the man in the street took heed never to forget the injustice of it. The war he had fought for king and country had taught him to think for himself – and to remember. Many, previously opposed to trades unions, flocked to join them if only as an act of defiance, even though only last year they had thrown out Ramsay MacDonald’s Labour government.

  ‘Is it going to be all right now?’ Alice demanded of Tom when the country shook its head and wondered what it had all been about.

  ‘As right as it’ll ever be,’ he comforted, though men would still fight each other for a day’s work and queue at factory gates for jobs that didn’t exist. ‘There are times, love, that I’m not ashamed I walked out of that war – do you know that?’

  ‘Aye, Tom. The older and wiser I get, the surer I am you did the right thing. Giles Sutton hated that war. He vowed he wouldn’t kill and he stuck it out – ’til someone sent him three white feathers. It was then he went as a stretcher bearer.’

  ‘I remember. Brave fools we called them. They’d crawl through the barbed wire at night into No Man’s Land, trying to get the wounded back and –’ He stopped, blocking out the horror of it as he blocked it out almost every day of his life.

  ‘Do you know who sent Giles those feathers, Tom? It was him …’

  ‘Elliot Sutton?’

  ‘Him. He let it slip, to Julia. She went for him like a wild thing. Punched her fist into his face. Told me that, if she could, she’d have killed him.’

  ‘Good for her! And I know you sometimes hanker for Rowangarth, Alice.’ He gathered her to him, laying his cheek on her hair. ‘And I know you miss Julia, and Reuben. But we’re better off, here; away from trouble – away from him.’

  ‘I know. Times when the longing comes over me, I remember the night they said you were dead and I tell myself how lucky I am. But Tom – I’d like to see Reuben. He’s getting old. Now that things are settling down, can Daisy and me go up there, maybe soon?’

  ‘That you can, love.’ He could deny her nothing, he loved her so much. ‘I reckon I can give you the train fare, an’ all.’

  ‘Thanks, but I’ve got it.’ She always kept it, safely hidden beneath her handkerchiefs, as an insurance. ‘I’ve a couple of pounds; it’s always there – just in case.’ In case Reuben should need her …

  ‘Then write and tell him you’ll be coming as soon as maybe, and tell Julia you’ll be needing a bed, at Rowangarth.’

  ‘You’re a good man, Tom.’ She reached up gently to kiss him, understanding why he, her husband, could never go with her to Rowangarth. For one thing, Tom could not rightly stay in a house that had once been hers for the short time she had been married to Giles; been Lady Alice Sutton. But deep inside her, she understood his real reluctance to return there. Denniston House was but a cock-stride from Rowangarth, and Tom’s hatred of the man who now lived there would never diminish. Tom had a temper that could flare white hot at only the mention of Elliot Sutton’s name. Much as Julia longed for it and the small miracle that could take them all back to the gamekeeper’s cottage at the edge of Brattocks Wood, it could never be – could it?

  18

  Amelia Sutton had declared her intention not to let the trouble in England interfere with their visit and now, as they waited at the river mouth for the pilot boat that would guide them up the Mersey, she felt a sense of homecoming, even though she was as American as Thanksgiving Day. She loved the amazing greenness of an English springtime and besides, Albert’s Yorkshire abounded in race courses and to attend race meetings delighted her. Horses – family apart – were her life. The British appreciated good horseflesh, so they passed muster with Amelia Sutton. It would be sad, though, to see Anna’s unhappiness, but Bas and Kitty had been warned not to talk about the baby and to be especially kind to their Aunt Anna. And there would be other babies, Amelia reasoned. Elliot’s wife was young enough to give him half a dozen sons, if that was wh
at he wanted. Elliot. She dismissed him from her mind and told her children they might go on deck to watch the liner come alongside.

  ‘We shall soon be at Grandmother Sutton’s,’ she told them, eager to show off the children it had once been doubtful she would ever bear. Sebastian, brown-haired, brown-eyed and serious though given at times to be led into mischief by his sister; Kathryn, hair Mary Anne black, her eyes the blue of a summer sky. Fearless on horseback, she out-rode and out-jumped her brother.

  Amelia smiled contentment. Bertie, Bas and Kitty. She loved them with all her grateful heart. Her mother-in-law’s bossiness did not deter her; Amelia Sutton’s own wealth guaranteed that. ‘Soon be at Pendenys …’

  ‘That place gives me the creeps,’ Bas brooded. ‘So many rooms and passages and staircases. I still get lost in it.’

  ‘It’s spooky,’ Kitty laughed. ‘It’s got ghosts in dark corners and footsteps behind you, always, and the eyes in the portraits follow you when you walk past. I just love it. I could live there for ever and ever!’

  ‘Out!’ ordered Albert. ‘Do as Nanny Eva tells you and don’t lean over the rail!’

  ‘Y’know, Bertie, mother-in-law was real put out that I filched the maid she loaned me to look after the children. She’s made a great nanny.’ English nannies were popular in America and it was with great glee that Amelia had lured housemaid Eva Roberts back to Kentucky, when Kitty had been a newborn babe. One in the eye for Her Mightiness, she had gloated. She wondered, serious again, how the little Russian countess was making out with the formidable Clementina.

  ‘We must be especially kind to Anna,’ she murmured. ‘The poor girl must have a lot to put up with. D’you reckon she’d appreciate a visit to Kentucky? It would surely do her good.’

  ‘We could ask, dear.’ Anywhere, Albert supposed, must be preferable to Pendenys. He understood his son’s dislike of the place; had always liked better the shabby cosiness of Rowangarth. ‘And you must make sure the children don’t mention the baby to Tatiana. Seems she was never told it was coming.’