Emma stared at him in surprise. Nobody ever spoke to her like that. She turned away without a word and walked to the far end of the barn, to swing on a rope that hung from the rafters. But after a while, feeling herself no longer observed, she slipped away out of the barn, into the house in search of her mother.
Gwen and Mrs Bessemer were busy in the kitchen with Kitty Cox, preparing luncheon for the shearers. Kitty was the stockman’s wife and worked in the house six days a week. She was strong, cheerful, sturdy and rough, and stood no nonsense from anyone. She put a biscuit into Emma’s hand and sent her out to the garden to play.
Gwen was surprised, knowing John Challoner’s passion for improvements on the farm, to find they did not extend to the house. Admittedly there were carpets in the best rooms and velvet curtains at the windows, but there was no piped water supply and no adequate sanitation. Water for the house came from a hand-pump outside the door, and the privy was merely a filthy latrine in a tumbledown shed next to the dairy. The kitchen range was very old and the stovepipe so rusted that it constantly smoked, yet Kitty was expected to produce a feast for the hungry shearers, and by some miracle, produce it she did.
Baked ham, boiled beef, and three pressed ox-tongues were carried out to the smaller barn and set on the trestle table there. Pork pies, mutton pasties, and jellied brawn, with bowls of potatoes, beans, and green peas, were carried out and set down there. Spotted dick puddings, apple tarts, jam turnovers and egg custards: all these were carried out; and, last but not least, a whole cheese was set on the board.
‘I wish their damned union could see them now!’ Challoner remarked to Gwen. ‘Stuffing themselves at my expense!’
They were a merry party at the table that day. The two groups of workmen got on well and the barrel of beer loosened their tongues. They returned to work in high good humour and as the shearing recommenced the jokes were still flying from mouth to mouth.
‘I ent got room for a ewe in my lap. My belly’s too full with all that good food.’
‘It’s the Chepsworth ale that’s done me in. This ewe of mine has got six legs!’
‘Anybody want a trim?’ Tupper asked. His clippers went snip-snip in the air. ‘Short back and sides? Or maybe a bob?’
‘Bobbed by Bob,’ said Billy Rye, and there was laughter all round as the men settled down to work again.
Later, however, towards the end, a quarrel blew up suddenly between Morton George on the one hand and an Outlands man named Jack Mercybright on the other.
‘Call that shearing?’ Mercybright said. ‘The moths could do a better job than that!’
Indeed the ewe was a sorry sight. She tottered away from Morton George with ridges of wool left on her sides and blood seeping from three or four cuts.
‘It’s these damned clippers, that’s what it is! I never used such duddy things!’
‘It’s a bad workman that blames his tools.’
‘Supposing we swap, then, you and me? You take my clippers and I’ll take yours.’
‘Supposing you deal with that ewe of yours before the flies get wind of her?’
‘Don’t you tell me what to do!’
George snatched up the pot of tar and angrily dabbed at the ewe’s wounds. He sent her, with a kick, to join the rest. The two shepherds, Goodshaw and Thorne, watched and listened while they worked, but neither of them spoke a word. The other shearers were silent too. Mercybright was an elderly man with thick grey hair and a grey beard, and was tall enough, when he stood erect, to look down his nose at Morton George.
‘Now what? You gone on strike?’
‘Maybe I have. I’ve a good cause. Shearing ent my proper work. Why should I shear the bloody sheep?’
‘It’s everyone’s work when it’s there to be done.’
‘It’s shepherd’s work. It ent mine. Why should we help to do their work?’
‘They help in the fields at harvest time. What’s the odds for God’s sake?’
‘The shepherd gets a lot more pay. Lambing money, for a start. Ask them two just what they earn!’
Outside in the yard, loading fleeces into a cart, Stephen and Challoner heard most of this. Challoner swore and leapt down. Stephen followed him into the barn.
‘What’s going on?’ Challoner bawled, but the two participants turned away, each seizing a ewe from the man at the gate and stooping to the work in hand. Challoner, after a glance round, led the way outside again.
‘You need to watch that fellow George. He’s a union man, he stirs things up. I’ve got three of them here, you know, and the first chance I get they’ll be out on their necks.’
‘I agree with what you say about George. The man’s a slacker, I know that. But why shouldn’t they belong to a union? We belong to the N.F.U.’
‘That’s different,’ Challoner said, but was unable to explain why.
That evening, when the shearing was done, Stephen and Gwen and the four children walked back home across the fields. The pockets of Emma’s pinafore were stuffed with bits of sheep’s wool and she carried a lamb’s tail in her hand. Her small legs were soon tired, and Stephen offered her a pick-a-back ride.
‘I’ll carry her,’ Chris said. He crouched for his sister to climb on his back. Gwen had told her eldest son that his father must be saved from exertion whenever possible, owing to the pains in his chest and side, and Chris had taken the lesson to heart. ‘Hold tight, Emma! We’re off!’ he cried, and galloped across the fields towards home, leaving the others well behind.
‘My hands are all soft with handling the fleeces,’ Joanna said, marvelling.
‘So are mine,’ Stephen said.
‘And mine! Have a feel!’ Jamesy said, and they all had to feel one another’s hands, to marvel at the softness of their skin.
‘It’s the lanolin,’ Stephen said.
‘What’s lanolin?’ Jamesy asked.
‘It’s the natural grease in sheep’s wool. It’s used in the making of ointments for our skin.’
‘Is it good for freckles?’ Joanna asked.
‘It won’t rub them out, if that’s what you mean.’
‘What a pity. I wish it would.’
‘Silly thing,’ Jamesy said.
Over their heads, their parents smiled. The business of watching their children grow up was a strange thing full of queer little quirks. They knew each one so intimately; the physical bond was so very close, every thought and feeling could be divined; yet what could they know of the people these children would one day become? Each one so different, moved by an unknown force within, yet all bearing a common likeness. Not just the likeness of face and form, but the affinity created by small daily experiences shared, stored up as though in a bank, from which they could draw at will.
The four children would grow apart. As adults they might be scattered about the world. But the memory of this particular day, for instance, would always be shared by all of them, and however briefly they might meet, a word would be enough to bring it back. The warm gusty day with its little showers; the smells of sheep muck and wool and tar; the magical softness of their hands: the day would be one they would remember always, in future times, when they were old; and the sharing of such memories was a thing they could only experience together, as members of the same family.
‘It’s a queer thing, being a parent,’ Stephen said, and Gwen, laughing, took his arm, knowing how much he had left unsaid.
They walked on with Jamesy and Joanna, and soon saw that Chris, arriving first, had already been at work. Smoke rose from the kitchen chimney. The kettle would be on for tea.
It was a wet summer that year. Haymaking spun itself out and was not finished until late July. Stephen had other worries, too, for the government was regretting its policy on corn prices and was threatening to remove the guarantee. His harvest that year was good enough, considering the wet season, but in November, when he sold his corn, prices were already beginning to fall, giving warning of what was to come.
Just before Christmas Morton
George came to him and asked for a rise of ten shillings.
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Stephen said. ‘You know what the present situation is.’
‘Yes, and I’m putting in now, before it gets worse. The union’s behind me in asking for this rise. They gave it out at the meeting last night.’
‘The union needs to face facts.’
‘I’ve seen the corn prices in The Gazette. The farmers ent all that badly hit.’
‘I’ve got to look ahead,’ Stephen said. ‘The good days for farming are petering out. We’ve all got to face that fact and pull in our horns.’
‘You don’t need to tell me!’ George exclaimed. ‘It’s what our speaker said last night. There’s dark days in front of us, I know that, and who’s going to suffer? ‒ Men like me!’
Stephen knew that it was true.
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The Sorrowing Wind (The Apple Tree Saga Book 3) Page 25