The Brooklands Girls

by Margaret Dickinson

  ‘Wouldn’t you mind?’

  Rebecca wrinkled her forehead. ‘To be honest, I haven’t given it much thought, but no, I don’t think I would. It might be rather nice to have half-brothers and sisters. I doubt I’ll ever have children of my own.’

  ‘Of course you will. Haven’t you got your eye on a handsome doctor or two at the hospital?’

  Rebecca pulled a face, but laughed. ‘There aren’t enough to go round.’

  ‘I’m sure you’ll meet someone one day. Don’t tell me you haven’t had half your male patients falling in love with you.’

  Now Rebecca laughed out loud. ‘Oh yes, but we all know not to take that too seriously, though—’ She glanced away, suddenly embarrassed, her cheeks a delicate shade of pink.

  ‘Go on,’ Pips prompted gently.

  ‘There is one patient who has kept in touch since he was discharged. He’s sent me flowers and chocolates and asked me to go out with him to dinner when he’s fully recovered.’

  ‘There you are, then.’

  ‘But I don’t know if it’s allowed. I mean, I don’t want to be dismissed or even reprimanded.’

  ‘I can’t see why it would be frowned upon, certainly not once he’s left the hospital. Go and talk to a senior member of staff. The matron, if necessary.’

  Rebecca’s face brightened. ‘Thanks, Pips, I will.’

  They were still standing together when George crossed the grass towards them and put an arm around each of them.

  ‘Everything all right?’ he asked, a little worriedly.

  ‘Everything’s fine, Dad,’ Rebecca said, and she kissed him on the cheek. Then she kissed Pips too. ‘Have a wonderful honeymoon. Where are you going, or is it a closely guarded secret?’

  ‘Absolutely.’ George smiled. ‘Even the bride doesn’t know yet.’

  It was time for the bride and groom to leave. Pips stood near the car with her back to all her guests and threw her bouquet over her head. It sailed high in the air, with the eager hands of all the village maidens reaching up to catch it. But the bouquet kept on flying over their heads until it began to drop and then it fell into Daisy’s arms.

  Pips turned and gave her niece a little wave and a broad wink. Then she climbed into the car beside George and they set off down the driveway with their guests waving and calling ‘goodbye’.

  ‘And who’s the lucky chap going to be, then?’ Luke grinned. He and Harry were standing close to Daisy, one on either side of her.

  Daisy’s gaze followed the car as it passed beneath the archway of the gatehouse, down the rest of the drive and into the lane. ‘Ah, now that,’ she said, with a mischievous smile, ‘would be telling.’

  Pips Maitland’s story began in the summer of 1914, just weeks before the declaration of World War I, in

  The Poppy Girls

  Available now

  Read the first chapter here:

  Lincolnshire, July 1914

  ‘Your daughter will drive me to an early grave. Now where is she?’

  Dr Edwin Maitland smiled indulgently at his irate wife and said mildly, ‘Why is she always my daughter when she’s annoying you, but yours when she pleases you?’

  ‘Which isn’t very often,’ Henrietta snapped.

  ‘Hetty, my love, she is young, healthy and energetic, and a clever girl who is very frustrated by the conventions of the times regarding the expected behaviour of young women. She is envious of her elder brother being able to train as a doctor whilst we’ – he paused briefly, for the future that had been mapped out for Philippa had not been his wish, though he must shoulder some of the blame for having tacitly agreed to it – ‘have curtailed her ambitions.’

  Henrietta spread her hands helplessly. ‘Why, oh why can’t she just be happy to find a nice husband and settle down? Why does she always have to vie with Robert in everything he does? We gave her a good education. Wasn’t that enough?’

  ‘But we didn’t allow her to go to university or to medical school as she wanted, did we?’

  ‘What use is a university education to a housewife and mother? And I suspect it was more because Robert had gone rather than that was what she really wanted to do.’ There was a pause before Henrietta said, ‘You haven’t answered my question. Where is she?’

  ‘Out somewhere. Down at the stables, possibly.’

  ‘She’ll break her neck on that stallion she rides. He’s hard to handle.’

  ‘Not for Pips. Midnight is as docile as a Shetland pony when she’s on his back.’

  Then, as another thought entered Henrietta’s mind, she said, ‘Don’t tell me she is out on that new contraption of Robert’s? Please don’t say she is riding pillion on his motorcycle?’

  ‘I really wouldn’t know, my love,’ Edwin murmured and turned away. He never lied to his wife, but he didn’t always tell her the whole truth. Yes, Pips was out with her brother and his new machine, but if Edwin knew his daughter, she wouldn’t be riding pillion; she’d be driving it . . .

  The subject of their conversation was at that moment indeed riding her brother’s new motorcycle through the village lanes, startling hens, chickens, dogs and cats as well as frightening the life out of the locals.

  ‘There she goes,’ Ma Dawson said aloud to no one in particular. ‘More spirit and daring than the rest of us put together, that one.’

  Ma was sitting in the sunshine in front of the ivy-clad cottage where the Dawson family lived, smoking her clay pipe and watching the world go by, as the machine roared past.

  The small village of Doddington, with one main street and lanes running from it into the surrounding countryside, lay approximately five miles west of Lincoln. At the heart of village life was the hall, a magnificent Elizabethan mansion, and its estate of gardens, park and farmland. The house, completed in 1600, was a symmetrical building, topped by three turrets with leaded cupolas, large windows and spacious rooms. Close by stood St Peter’s church, rebuilt in 1771 but keeping its Early English font.

  Ma Dawson was probably the oldest person in the village, with pure white hair under her lace bonnet, though she would never reveal her true age. Rumour had it that she wasn’t really sure herself just how old she was, though the fact that she had married her soldier husband on his return from the Crimean War meant that she must be eighty at least. Widowed in 1900, she now lived with her son and his family. After leaving the regular army, her husband had learned the trade of carpenter and wheelwright from his uncle and now their son, Leonard, continued the village industry. To Ma’s delight, three of her four grandsons were also learning the trade and expanding the family business too. When the village blacksmith had become too old to carry on and had had no one to inherit his business, Leonard and his sons had taken on the workshop, which was only a few yards from their own home and workplace. Now the Dawsons were not only the village’s carpenter, wheelwright and undertaker, but also its blacksmith.

  As she closed her eyes and lifted her face to the sun, Ma could hear Roy and Harold, the two youngest boys, sawing wood – the trunk of a huge tree they’d felled earlier that day. And from the blacksmith’s shop came the sound of Bernard’s hammer striking the anvil with a sharp clanging sound that echoed along the village street.

  ‘Here you are, Ma, a nice cup of tea and your favourite biscuit.’

  Ma opened her eyes to squint up at her daughter-in-law, Norah.

  ‘Ta, duck. Sit down a minute, why don’t you? You’ve been on the go since dawn.’

  ‘Aye well, Ma. Len and the lads work hard. They have to have a good breakfast inside them before they start in a morning, now don’t they?’

  ‘You’re a good wife and mother, Norah. I couldn’t have wished for anyone better for my son. And you’ve given me lovely grandchildren too. Four boys and a girl. Who’d have thought it, with me only ever being able to have just the one. I’m proud of all of them.’ She paused and smiled toothlessly. ‘Even William.’

  Norah pulled a face and sighed. ‘Maybe he’s better employed at the hall
for Mrs Maitland as her gardener and handyman. I don’t think working with his father and brothers would have been right for him, do you?’ Norah was small and thin, with her grey hair pulled back into a bun. She wore a perpetually worried expression for she was always busy looking after the family; her husband, Len, her mother-in-law, who was always called Ma, and five children, though only the four boys still lived at home. Alice, the only girl in the family, worked as a lady’s maid at the hall and lived in there. She visited on her days and afternoons off and always tried to give her work-worn mother a helping hand.

  Ma was thoughtful for a moment before saying slowly, ‘No, I don’t, though it would have been nice if they’d all been in the family business. But William is a bit of a black sheep. He’s better ploughing his own furrow.’ She laughed at her own little joke. ‘Literally, sometimes, when he’s called in to help out on the farm.’

  ‘I have to admit he’s clever with machinery. If owt goes wrong with the threshing gear at harvest, it’s William they call for. And he looks after Dr Maitland’s new car now.’

  For many years, ever since he’d moved into the hall on his marriage to Henrietta Schofield, Edwin Maitland had been the local doctor, holding surgeries in a side room at the hall. Previously, when a home visit to a patient was necessary, he’d travelled around the villages in a pony and trap. But recently, he’d acquired a motor car and now he drove in comparative comfort on his rounds.

  Ma nodded down the lane where Pips and the roaring motorcycle had disappeared round the corner. ‘And I expect William will be looking after Master Robert’s newfangled machine, an’ all.’

  ‘I wonder if he’s bought that to use when he becomes a partner in his father’s practice?’

  With a keen interest, the villagers had watched the children at the hall grow and develop. They were devoted to the Maitland family. Henrietta was a firm, but fair, mistress of the house and its estate and many of the locals depended on her for their livelihood from the work that her lands gave them. And, although he was heir to the estate, it had been no surprise when they’d learned that, at eighteen, Robert had gone to medical school.

  ‘Following in his father’s footsteps,’ they’d agreed.

  After qualifying, he’d taken up a post as a junior doctor at Lincoln’s County Hospital for a year, but soon – after the approaching August Bank holiday, it was rumoured – he was to become a partner in his father’s practice.

  The two women were silent for some moments, soaking up the sunshine. For Norah, it was a welcome respite in a busy day.

  ‘What’s going to happen, Ma?’ she asked softly at last, hardly daring to put her fears into words just in case a malevolent Fate was listening. ‘With the assassination of this archduke – whoever he is. Len says there’s even talk of it escalating into war.’

  Ma shrugged philosophically. ‘Out of our hands, duck. If it comes, it comes. I’ve lived through ’em afore and – God willing – I will again.’

  ‘But the lads would all have to go, wouldn’t they?’

  ‘Aye. Certainly Bernard and William and probably Roy too, though Harold at fifteen wouldn’t go immediately.’

  ‘He’ll be sixteen next month,’ Norah murmured. There was a pause before she said, ‘What about Len?’

  ‘He’ll likely be too old. Besides, they’ll need the farms to produce more food and Len’s work is mostly for the local farmers, now, isn’t it? To say nothing of the work that comes from Mrs Maitland’s lands.’

  ‘It’s strange, isn’t it, a woman owning a big estate like that?’ Norah said.

  Ma chuckled. ‘It’s not as big as some estates, but it’s sizeable enough to give local folks a lot of employment – including our family in several ways. And, as for Mrs Maitland owning it, well, there’s no one better. I’m only glad it didn’t go to some far-off cousin or someone who’d have had no interest in it at all.’

  ‘Was she the only one who could inherit it, then? I thought it usually went to a male, however distantly related.’

  ‘Luckily for us, there wasn’t anyone. Mrs Maitland – Hetty, as I still call her, because I’ve known her since she was a bairn – has lived at the hall all her life. She inherited from her childless uncle who died in – now let me think’ – Ma puckered her already wrinkled brow even more – ‘about 1905, I think it was, and the estate came straight to Hetty ’cos her mother, who would have inherited, had died the year before.’

  ‘So it didn’t go to her father, then?’

  ‘Of course not. He wasn’t a blood relative, now was he?’

  Norah shook her head and then asked slowly, ‘So, who will inherit after Mrs Maitland? Miss Pips?’

  Ma shook her head. ‘Not when there’s a son. It’ll be Master Robert. Unless, of course—’ She hesitated and then whispered, ‘he goes to war.’

  They had come full circle, back to the start of the conversation and their fears for their own family. Now, as they sat together in silence, they were both thinking the same thing, but it was Ma who put it into words. ‘It’ll affect us all, you know, if it does come. All our sons – whatever their class – will have to go.’

  To that, Norah had no answer, but it left her wondering and worrying even more.

  The Brooklands Girls

  Margaret Dickinson, a Sunday Times top ten bestseller, was born and brought up in Lincolnshire and, until very recently, lived in Skegness where she raised her family. Her ambition to be a writer began early and she had her first novel published at the age of twenty-five, and she has now written over twenty-five novels – set mostly in her home county but also in Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire and South Yorkshire. The Brooklands Girls is the sequel to the bestseller The Poppy Girls.

  ALSO BY MARGARET DICKINSON

  Plough the Furrow

  Sow the Seed

  Reap the Harvest

  The Miller’s Daughter

  Chaff Upon the Wind

  The Fisher Lass

  The Tulip Girl

  The River Folk

  Tangled Threads

  Twisted Strands

  Red Sky in the Morning

  Without Sin

  Pauper’s Gold

  Wish Me Luck

  Sing As We Go

  Suffragette Girl

  Sons and Daughters

  Forgive and Forget

  Jenny’s War

  The Clippie Girls

  Fairfield Hall

  Welcome Home

  The Buffer Girls

  Daughters of Courage

  The Poppy Girls

  First published 2019 by Macmillan

  This electronic edition first published 2019 by Pan Books

  an imprint of Pan Macmillan

  20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR

  Associated companies throughout the world

  www.panmacmillan.com

  ISBN 978-1-5098-5150-8

  Copyright © Margaret Dickinson 2019

  Credit: Design © www.blacksheep-uk.com. Models © www.colinthomas.co.uk Background image © Heritage Images / Getty Images

  The right of Margaret Dickinson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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  et Dickinson, The Brooklands Girls