by Amy Myers
‘But I want to help win this war in my own way,’ Caroline said hopelessly. ‘Not Lady Hunney’s—and not Reggie’s.’
‘Then let’s turn round and go to see Nanny Oates. She is pursuing her own war effort too.’
Seeing Nanny was not the ordeal she had feared. Apart from a sharp comment that Caroline wasn’t feeding herself properly in London, and was looking as sour as a gazel (her native Kentish name for a blackcurrant), she talked of her hens and eggs, and Caroline was left in peace.
Not for long. As soon as she was home, the second inquisition began.
‘Where’s your ring?’ Isabel asked curiously, as they crossed in the entrance hall.
‘Back with its owner.’ Families! Normally Isabel wouldn’t have noticed if Caroline dyed her hair pink, but today she was as observant as a blackbird after worms.
Isabel frowned. ‘You mean you’ve broken off your engagement?’
Caroline was tempted to say yes, but it took too much emotional energy to lie. ‘No. Lady Hunney and Reggie have broken it off for me.’
‘How could Maud do it?’ Isabel was bewildered.
Something snapped. ‘I don’t want to talk about it!’ Caroline yelled, pushing past her and rushing upstairs to her bedroom, where she slammed the door. A closed door in the Rectory meant no callers please.
Isabel broke all the rules by coming in after her and hugging her. ‘I’m so sorry, Caroline. Men are horrible, aren’t they? How could Reggie do it to you?’
‘It’s the war,’ Caroline answered, trying to respond to Isabel’s warm affection but failing. ‘It changes everything.’ Did it? Had it? Or might it have happened anyway?
‘I know, darling. I never thought when I married Robert that he would leave me. Now he’s in Gallipoli, and I don’t know whether he’s alive or dead. Marriage isn’t so wonderful,’ she informed her sister earnestly. ‘You haven’t missed anything.’
By the time she returned to London on Sunday evening, Caroline had managed to paper over the wound of her unhappiness, though she still seemed to be dragging a heavy load around with her, like Marley’s ghost with his chains of penance. In the office it was easier to behave as though everything were normal. ‘If only they don’t notice the ring’s gone,’ she told herself. ‘I’ll be all right.’ She found that the huge piles of letters reassured her. There were obviously thousands of women who felt as she did that work was an answer to the problems of war. So why did she feel so desolate?
‘Where’s your ring?’ Angela asked on her next free day at Norland Square. ‘You haven’t lost it, have you?’
Like Isabel, Angela was not renowned for tact. ‘No.’ Caroline spoke through gritted teeth. She had to tell the whole story again; the only comfort being that it was becoming so familiar, at least inside her head, that it was beginning to hurt a little less.
‘I suppose it was inevitable,’ said Angela when she’d finished.
‘Why?’ Caroline was stung.
‘Well.’ Angela looked surprised. ‘I’ve only met Reggie once but he struck me as a stickler for tradition. He’ll turn into a regular Jorrocks in middle age.’
‘I’m a traditionalist too,’ Caroline countered, somewhat disarmed by the thought of Reggie as a pot-bellied fox-hunting man.
‘Then what are you doing working in London? It’s different for me, of course. I’m a VAD so when the war is over I’ll go back to Dover and take up where I left off, but you’re rushing around on a crusade like Josephine Butler, except that you’re organising work for women, not saving them from sin. When the war’s over, and the men come marching home, you’ll have to decide whether you’re going to go on crusading for women to continue to do men’s jobs, or for the vote.’
Caroline stared at her. This was an aspect she had not considered; to her the present need was so urgent that she had ignored the wider implications.
‘Father thinks,’ Angela continued, ‘it’s secret of course—that when the harvest is over in France in September there’ll be a big British offensive. Really big, not just limited objectives.’
Once this news would have filled Caroline with terror. Now it had the ring of remorseless inevitability.
‘There’s a war of words on at present between the Government and the Imperial General Staff. The brass hats don’t think the Army is up to it after the awfulness of the spring, and the new troops going out there haven’t had enough training.’
‘What training do you need to be slaughtered?’
‘That’s not like you, Caroline.’ Angela was shocked. ‘Words like that don’t win wars.’
‘War, war, war!’ Caroline shouted, goaded beyond endurance. ‘I’m sick of it.’
‘Perhaps Reggie is too.’
Furious, because she knew Angela was in the right, Caroline stamped off to her room, aching with self-pity.
Despite her work, and despite filling her evenings with visits to concerts and theatres, her days dragged. Once she would have revelled in the new freedom; now she was beginning to take it for granted. Even George Grossmith in Tonight’s the Night at the Gaiety, singing ‘They Didn’t Believe Me’ with Madge Saunders, failed to enchant her; for at night she returned to face Angela’s words in the loneliness of her room. Perhaps Reggie was too.
Why had pride kept her from making the first overture? She would write to him, bridge the gap, make it easy for him to heal the break; she would tell him how much she loved him and that she would wait for him. On the Saturday, she could hold back no longer. She rose early and ran down to the morning-room desk, her fingers trembling with emotion as she seized pen and paper.
Darling Reggie,
I must write, I must reach you before you’re as far away in heart as in fact. I know it’s just the war that is doing this to us, and that we are seeing each other as through a glass darkly because of it. When it is over, you will return and we shall meet in our apple orchard as though all this had never happened. Please, please tell me you realise this too.
If only you knew how I long for you—’
She hesitated for a moment, then plunged on. She had to pour out her heart no matter what the pain, to prevent further misunderstandings—for, surely, that was what had caused their rift?
… how I long to take your poor tired body in my arms and lull it into peace with mine. All that matters is that we love each other and, if we cling to that, then love will clear a path for us. Oh my darling, shall we try? Your whirling dervish will be waiting, O Lord Kitchener!
Her eyes misted as their childhood game stabbed her with poignancy. Far-off days, those days of summer. But they would come again. They must, no matter how hard she found it to make this appeal.
Seized with conviction that she was doing the right thing, she signed her name with a dash, then stared in dismay at the ink blob which the nib had deposited on her name and blotted it quickly. Not carefully enough; it smudged. She couldn’t write it again, she couldn’t. Anyway, the blob would remind him so much of the old Caroline that it would make Reggie laugh. She would send it, blots and all.
Elizabeth did a little skip as soon as she was far enough along the footpath not to be seen. She felt like a girl again, hurrying to her father’s hopgarden.
Hop-picking time in Kent had been the major event of the year in her village. On a certain day towards the end of August the main contingent of pickers would arrive in their hundreds from the railway station, children and luggage spilling everywhere, down from the East End of London for what was for them their summer holiday. Not all the pickers were East-Enders of course; in Kent, as here in Sussex, local women picked and helped repair pokes and baskets. Gypsies too, and waygoers, would arrive faithfully every year for six weeks’ sure money. With probably selective memory she remembered the long balmy evenings, as families sat outside primitive huts cooking over a fire. And she recalled lovers’ meetings in the cool of the day sheltered by unpicked bines. On such a night she and Laurence had sat, talking, laughing, loving.
It was in the
hopgarden she had first met him. Staying nearby with his brother Gerald, he had come to pick at her father’s farm, dressed in rough labourer’s clothes, both boys pretending to be casual waygoers. She had been strictly forbidden by her parents to enter the hopgarden but, after one illicit visit, she had been so beguiled by this handsome ‘labourer’ that night after night she found herself sitting on his jacket at his side on the grass. And then, one evening he kissed her and that was that. Her life was decided.
As the soporific smell of the hops hit her nose, the illusion that she had stepped back in time was complete. Temporarily released from her Ashden role, she looked at the familiar scene before her and wondered why in all her years as Laurence’s wife she had never thought to come here at hop-picking time.
She wandered down the rows of bines, delighted that she was all but anonymous; strangers were plucking hops brought down by the binman’s hook and dropping them into the waiting bin. Shouts, yells, wads, snatches of music-hall and popular war marching songs filled her ears; the buzz of conversation around her, ‘It’s a long way to Tipperary’ roaring out from the next row. Then she realised that an altercation was going on in the row on the opposite side from ‘Tipperary’. Abusive shouts and angry voices were so loud she wondered the binman had not intervened, and she went to see what was going on. At first she could not make it out. Just a crowd of men and women with something—no, someone—in the centre of them. She caught a brief glimpse and realised to her horror it was not only a woman but someone whose face she knew.
‘Leave me alone,’ Lizzie was shrieking.
A particularly vicious swipe with a stripped bine caught her round the face and she staggered back into the yelling crowd behind her.
‘Stop this at once,’ Elizabeth shouted. She had a strong voice and the workers stopped for a moment in surprise, giving her the chance to push towards Lizzie. It was no surprise to see that a Thorn was taking a leading part—George, Ernie’s elder brother—but most were strangers to her, East-Enders, no doubt still so incensed at Zeppelin bombs that they needed little incentive to attack anything and anyone German, even if only by association.
By the time she reached Lizzie the girl was screaming in pain, her arms twisted behind her. Then, just as Elizabeth began to fear for her own safety, the crowd fell to one side as Frank Eliot appeared, threatening to pack the lot of them back where they came from and bar them from the hopgardens for ever. With a last cry of ‘German whore’ from an unidentifiable source the brawlers melted away, leaving the three of them together: Lizzie tear-stained and marked with red weals from the bines, Elizabeth, her heart thumping now danger was past, and a grim-faced Frank.
‘I didn’t start it,’ Lizzie cried. ‘I can’t help having a German husband. It doesn’t make me a German, does it? I didn’t sink the bloody Lusitania, or drop no bombs.’
‘Is that what it was about? Then I’m ashamed this has happened in my hopgarden,’ Frank replied.
Lizzie shrugged. ‘It’s happened before and will likely happen again.’
‘Happened before?’
‘In my cottage which the Rector got me.’
‘Have you told Police Constable Ifield?’ Elizabeth was appalled.
‘What’s the use? The whole village is against me just because I’m married to a German.’
‘You can’t go back to your cottage on the Ashden estate after this,’ Frank said. ‘Many of this mob were from the East End, but some were local.’
‘What else do you suggest?’ Lizzie sneered. ‘Buckingham Palace?’
‘The Rectory,’ offered Elizabeth immediately.
Lizzie hesitated, taken aback by kindness. ‘Thank you, Mrs Lilley, but no. I get on with Ma fine when we’re apart, but not under the same roof. I’d rather take my chances in the cottage.’
‘But it’s so isolated,’ Elizabeth worried. ‘My husband told me it’s almost as far as the Manor’s forest boundary.’
‘I could find you a small house on this estate when hop-picking’s over, if you’re prepared to go to the Rectory in the meantime,’ Frank offered. ‘No one would dare harm you here. The Swinford-Browne estate is guarded.’
‘Could you?’ Lizzie’s face was suspicious, but hopeful.
‘But—’ Elizabeth stopped, remembering that Lizzie was no longer a Dibble but Lizzie Stein, a married woman, and she had no jurisdiction over her, whatever she chose to do.
Agnes stretched contentedly. Her old room at the Rectory was luxury compared with Castle Tillow, even though it now contained Elizabeth Agnes’s cradle as well as her. It was funny being back; it was as though nothing had changed and she was still Agnes Pilbeam, the new parlourmaid at the Rectory. But she wasn’t, she reminded herself. She was Agnes Thorn. Apart from its association with Jamie she hated the name Thorn. Jamie’s mother wouldn’t even speak to her now she’d refused yet again to work in the ironmongery. And not even Len would dare try to force her because of the Rectory. Yes, she was safe—and so for the moment was Jamie. Under her pillow was a letter which arrived yesterday, dated 7th September. ‘We are being rested for a week or two.’
She didn’t like the sound of that. Rested for what? Something important was going to happen, and Jamie would be in it. At least she’d seen him in May. That was another reason Mrs Thorn didn’t like her. He hadn’t gone to see his mother, or anyone else come to that. Only her. Nor had he at Christmas when they were wed. ‘Why not, Jamie?’ she’d asked.
‘Because I ain’t going back until I’ve got a medal, Agnes, that’s why.’
‘A medal? But that’s daft, Jamie. You’ve shown ’em all what you’re made of by volunteering, you don’t have to have a special medal too.’
‘Daft or not, that’s what I decided. They didn’t—’
He stopped, but she guessed what he was going to say. ‘They didn’t believe me last year’—but nor had she for a while. Oh, how she’d make it up to him when he came marching home for good.
Quickly she washed, fed Elizabeth Agnes, and hurried downstairs. ‘Morning, Mrs Dibble.’
‘Good morning, Miss P—Mrs Thorn. Late, aren’t you?’
Agnes laughed. ‘No. You’re early. As always, Mrs Dibble.’ Nothing and no one had the power to upset her now she was back in the Rectory. Mrs Dibble had once been a terrifying monster. Now she was a flesh and blood cantankerous old biddy.
‘Myrtle says we’re out of glove-cleaning paste.’
‘I’ll mix some up.’
‘I’ll do it myself. That way it gets done. And the mangle rollers is getting hollow again.’ Mrs Dibble sniffed.
‘What’s wrong?’ Agnes realised that even Mrs Dibble wasn’t usually so pernickety over mere trifles.
‘Nothing, Mrs Thorn.’ The reply was quick and sharp. ‘Why should it be, save that I’m all behind?’
‘Something is.’
‘Mayhap. We’re going to have a guest.’ Mrs Dibble looked defiantly at Agnes.
‘The family, you mean? Miss Tilly?’
‘No, us. The servants’ hall. Only a guest, mark you. Too la-di-da to do honest work for her living.’
‘Who are you talking about?’
‘My Lizzie.’
‘But I thought—’
‘What you thought and what is are as different as lardy cakes and latten bells,’ Mrs Dibble snapped. ‘She should never have married that German. I was against it all along. Just because someone’s banging out jolly songs on a drum doesn’t mean they don’t have evil hearts.’
‘She seemed very happy with him,’ Agnes ventured.
To her horror, the impossible happened. Mrs Dibble, she saw, was crying. Her face was wrinkling up and she was screwing it up in an effort to stop the tears.
‘You sit down, Mrs D,’ Agnes commanded. ‘I’m going to make the tea, and you can tell me all about it. It can’t be as bad as you think.’
‘Joe out there fighting them Germans. Lizzie attacked here for being wed to one,’ Mrs Dibble whispered. ‘I don’t know what the world’s co
ming to. And her not wanting to live here even though Mrs Lilley asked her for the second time. Not live with her own mother, indeed. Why not, I ask you?’
Agnes knew the answer to this one. She poured the water into the teapot. ‘Sometimes,’ she explained, ‘mothers and daughters love each other but can’t live together. I couldn’t go home no more than Lizzie can. And Lizzie’s been a married lady longer than me.’
‘Miss Isabel’s come home. She ain’t so hard-hearted.’ Mrs Dibble sniffed.
‘If you ask me,’ Agnes remarked companionably, ‘Miss Isabel only comes home so she doesn’t have to go on thinking for herself at Hop House. That Mrs Bugle, so I hear, isn’t a patch on you. Why, if she were even a hundredth as good as you are, that Mrs Swinford-Browne would have had her at The Towers. What we would do without you, I don’t know.’
Mrs Dibble’s chest swelled infinitesimally as she watched the tea being poured into her cup, nice and strong. ‘Always was a self-centred little thing, Miss Isabel, for all she can twist you round her little finger in a moment. She’s not like Miss Caroline.’
‘I miss Miss Caroline.’ Agnes was wistful. They were the same age, twenty-three, and she felt a proprietorial interest in her.
‘We’ll be missing her a lot more, you mark my words,’ announced Mrs Dibble darkly.
‘When she marries Mr Reginald, you mean?’
‘I do hear Mr Reginald and she aren’t engaged any more. Have you seen that ring? I ain’t.’ Mrs Dibble reflected on the oddities of life. Here she was swapping stories with Miss Pilbeam, of whom she used to disapprove so strongly. Still, Agnes was a married woman now, mature.
‘She’s never broken it off?’ Agnes exclaimed.
‘Him more like. That Lady Hunney can be a tartar.’
Agnes gave due consideration to this, remembering how scared she had been as a child when Lady Hunney sailed through their cottage door without so much as a by-your-leave bearing a basket of fruit from Ashden’s greenhouses for her mother who was sick. Her presence had seemed to fill the whole room. ‘She is that,’ she agreed.