Yorkshire Rose

by Margaret Pemberton

  She was far more than a junior textile designer now. In all but name she ran the Department and, in many ways, was on the brink of running the entire mill.

  “What do you think of this, Rose?” Walter would ask as they ate dinner together at Crag-Side in lonely grandeur. “Should I do this? What do you think of our taking on this government contract? What do you think Harry would do? What do you think Harry would think?”

  His questions and prevarications were endless and all Rose could do in advising him was to learn everything she could about the running of Rimmington’s, use her common sense and, above all, keep her fingers firmly crossed.

  In June she was deeply shocked by the assassination in Sarajevo of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Habsburg throne, but it still didn’t occur to her that Harry’s predictions of a war between Great Britain and Germany were on the brink of being fulfilled.

  “Grey’s neutralist policy will keep us out of trouble,” Walter said to her reassuringly. “This new trouble in the Balkans will blow over just like all the other spots of trouble there have blown over.”

  In this, as in so many other things, Walter was wrong. Ultimatums were issued. Armies were mobilized. The Kaiser declared war on his cousin, the Czar, and then on France. Great Britain told Germany it was standing by the Treaty of London which guaranteed Belgian neutrality and that it would protect the French coastline. Germany ignored the warning and, on the 4th of August, a British Bank Holiday, German armies invaded Belgium. By midnight of the same day, Britain and Germany were at war.

  “Thank God!” Lottie said fervently. “No more shillyshallying! No more spineless neutrality! Bullies shouldn’t be endured and now that nasty old bully, the Kaiser, will get what he deserves! A bloody nose!”

  She and Noel had been spending the holiday weekend at Crag-Side and were sitting with Rose, William and Sarah, by the edge of the tennis-court.

  “And what about all the thousands who’ll be conscripted into his army and who don’t deserve a bloody nose and will simply die obeying orders?” Noel said so caustically that Lottie’s carefully pencilled eyebrows flew nearly into her hair.

  Emma Rose had been happily picking daisies and was now beginning to eat them. Sarah scooped her up in her arms and, as she removed the daisies from Emma Rose’s chubby fist, said, “But when there’s open conflict between good and evil, when one’s very principles are at stake, surely wars have to be fought then, Noel?”

  Noel rose to his feet and looked around at them all, the sun glinting like fire on his mahogany-red hair. “Not by me, they don’t,” he said starkly. “Not when to do so would be to flout my principles. I’ve given this a lot of thought over the last few months and the conclusion I’ve come to, is that I don’t intend either enlisting or being conscripted.”

  “I’m sorry?” William wondered if he’d missed something Noel had been saying. He certainly wasn’t making sense. As a healthy twenty-two-year-old not in a reserved occupation, Noel wasn’t going to have any alternative but to enlist or wait for his conscription papers.

  Noel didn’t look at him. He looked at Lottie. “I’m not going to fight,” he said bluntly. “I’m a creative artist, not a legalized murderer. I’m going to stand by my principles and declare myself a conscientious objector.”

  For a moment no one spoke or moved. Rose was dizzyingly trying to come to terms with just what being a conscientious objector was going to entail for Noel. Sarah, despite her belief that there were such things as righteous wars, and that the present war, as far as Great Britain and her Allies were concerned, certainly fell into such a category, was quietly admiring. After all, it was no use having principles and beliefs if, when the crunch came, you didn’t stand up for them, no matter how unpopular standing up for them might be.

  It was William who put his reaction into words first. “Become a conscientious objector? A conchie?” He rose to his feet, running a hand through his hair. “You can’t be serious, Noel! How can you stay home painting when other chaps will be fighting for your king, your country, your freedoms?”

  “I doubt if I’ll be doing much painting,” Noel said dryly. “I rather suspect I’ll be down a coalmine somewhere, or in a steelworks, or—”

  “I don’t believe you.” It was Lottie. Ashen-faced, she sprang to her feet, facing him. “Tell me this is a sick joke, Noel. Tell me you don’t mean it. Please, please tell me you don’t mean it!”

  He gazed at her in helpless despair. He had hoped she would react differently. He had hoped that, as always previously, she would be his fiercest, staunchest ally. And he knew now he’d been hoping in vain. Lottie, with her direct, no-nonsense, confrontational approach to life, was mentally incapable of understanding the stance he was taking.

  “I’m sorry, love,” he said, knowing how fiercely she wanted him to be the hero above all other heroes; the knight on a white charger who would cover himself with glory on the battlefield. “I should have told you how I felt sooner …”

  “Oh God!” Tears were pouring down her face. “Oh Christ!” Shaking violently, uncaring of how she was shocking Sarah with her blasphemies, she began struggling with the ring that had unofficially graced the fourth finger of her left hand all during the summer. “I can’t believe this!” She was hyperventilating, her breath ragged. “I can’t live with this! I can’t endure the pain of it! The man I wanted to marry, a coward! My cousin, a coward!” She wrenched the ring from her finger, flinging it down in front of him on the daisy-starred grass. “I want to die with the shame of it. I wish I was dead! I wish both of us were dead!”

  She fell down on to her knees, covering her face with her hands, sobbing as if she would never stop.

  Noel made no move towards her. His face contorted with pain, he turned on his heel, striding away from them as if he were striding out of their lives for ever.

  Rose ran after him, but couldn’t keep up with him. Without returning to the house for his weekend bag he headed straight down into Ilkley, making for the railway station. He knew that Rose would do her damnedest to understand, and that, God willing, Harry would understand, but that no one else would.

  Grimly he swung himself aboard a London-bound train. From now on, until the war in whichever way, ended, he was going to be on his own with only white feathers for company. He wondered if Lottie would send him one. He wondered if human hearts could break, and if his were doing so.

  William, hoping to God that news of Noel’s decision wouldn’t reach the ears of his electorate, joined the London Volunteer Defence Force.

  Rupert joined an élite regiment.

  In Bradford, the number of volunteers was such that the town formed its own battalion, the 1st Bradford Pals Battalion. Micky was one of the first young men through the recruiting office doors. Hard on his heels was Charlie Thorpe.

  Lottie, on hearing that Nina’s friend, the Duchess of Sutherland, was taking a Red Cross Hospital to France and that she was taking her daughters and her daughters’friends with her as nursing staff, immediately wrote to her, asking if she could accompany their party as a volunteer nurse.

  Nina offered her services to Guy’s Hospital, putting her patriotism to the test by wearing a monstrous uniform.

  ‘The dress is made out of purple and white striped material that wouldn’t disgrace a tent,’ she wrote to Rose. ‘It fits like a tent, too. I swear Gertie Graham could wear it and have room to spare. I bunch the whole hideous thing together with a belt and then, for the crowning touch, don black wool stockings and flat black shoes! If Rupert could see me he would have ten fits!’

  For the early months of the war, during the period when everyone was confidently predicting it ‘would be over by Christmas,’ and that ‘we’ll soon roll’em up’, Rose worked long fourteen-hour days at the mill. There was no designing new patterns now. Only the overseeing of the fulfilling of a huge government contract for khaki, khaki, and yet more khaki and, constantly, the long, agonizing wait for letters from Harry.

  As a regular ser
ving officer he had been despatched to the front almost immediately. In August he was in the thick of the bloodbath that was Mons. In September he was part of the Allied armies’ retreat from the Marne. In October he was one of the countless many fighting back towards the Marne, recovering ground once lost and enabling British and Allied newspapers to print banner headlines declaring: ‘PARIS SAVED: GERMANS IN RETREAT!’

  ‘One thing is for certain,’ he wrote to her grimly in November, ‘and that is that the war isn’t going to be over by Christmas. There are times when I doubt it will even be over by next Christmas.’

  In the New Year it looked as if Harry’s predictions were, once again, going to be proved correct. The German retreat was limited. Both sides resorted to constructing defence-works and a line of trenches extended from Nieuport on the Belgian coast, all the way through Ypres, Arras, Soissons and Rheims, to Verdun. Neither side advanced, or retreated, more than a few miserable miles.

  ‘It’s deadlock,’ Harry wrote to her in February, ‘and it’s being suffered under conditions beyond description. I don’t want to write of it, Funny-Face. I can’t write of it. I just want to think of Crag-Side, and the mill, and wonderful, wonderful, heather-covered Ilkley Moor.’

  On the Eastern Front, in April, the Allies despatched troops to Gallipoli in order to try and seize the forts guarding the approach to Constantinople, thereby opening up a route to assist the beleaguered Russians. Rupert sailed with them.

  The Commander-in-charge of the operation, knowing the Turks would be manning the heights in massive numbers above the narrow beach on which his men were to land, devised an approach reminiscent of that once used by the Ancient Greeks at nearby Troy. Instead of an apparently innocent wooden horse, however, he used an apparently innocent sea-horse, a collier, the River Clyde.

  Huge openings were cut in the River Clyde’s sides in order that, as soon as it was run aground, the troops could pour from it.

  When they did so, they did not succeed in taking the Turks by surprise. Instead, they ran headlong into hell. Beating a way ashore under the murderous onslaught of the Turkish guns, the sea stained red with the blood of the dying and dead, Rupert was one of the few who gained the beach. Amid the mayhem and carnage he found there, he rallied the remnants of his battalion and, achieving the impossible, captured the Turkish-defended heights. There, engaged like a gladiator in brutal hand-to-hand fighting, fearless and courageous and twenty-five years old, he died a hero’s death.

  On hearing the news, Rose left immediately for London. Nina was beyond comfort; beyond any kind of rational behaviour. For once in her life, Rose was out of her depth.

  ‘I think Neen’s losing her reason,’ she wrote to William. ‘She doesn’t even seem to be aware of my presence. Ma might be able to get some response from her, but no matter how hard I try, I can’t.’

  Lizzie, still in mourning for Laurence, travelled down to London and installed herself in the Strachan town house. Rose returned to Crag-Side.

  Rimmington’s was now in production virtually around the clock and it was she, not Walter, who dealt with suppliers and customers. With Belgian and French textile mills occupied by the Germans, and Russian and Polish mills devastated, Rimmington’s was receiving orders not only from France, but from Serbia and Russia as well.

  ‘Keep up the good work, Funny-Face,’ Harry had written from the front. ‘Grandfather would be proud of you!’

  In June the Thorpe family received news that Charlie had been seriously wounded and moved to a field hospital at Boulogne.

  ‘As soon as he opened his mouth I knew he was from Bradford,’ Lottie wrote to Rose. ‘And then he said he’d like to show me a photograph of his sweetheart and he asked me to open his wallet for him and what do I see? I see my father’s lady friend’s daughter smiling sunnily up at me! If Papa marries Mrs Wilkinson and Charlie Thorpe marries Jenny, does that mean I’ll be related to Charlie? It would make the head of a banshee whirl! The next bit isn’t nice, but has to be told. Charlie Thorpe’s left leg was amputated the evening he was brought in here. Break the news to Jenny gently. At least Charlie’s now out of the war and will soon be on his way home to her.’

  At the end of June, Rose fell ill with a particularly vicious form of influenza. At the beginning of July Harry came home on leave. There was no possibility of any trips out together, either to the mill or to the moors. All she could do was lie back against her pillows, her temperature, according to Walter, ‘soaring off the thermometer’, and rejoice in the fact that, after nearly a year at the front, she could feast her eyes on him, reassuring herself that he, at least, was still blessedly all in one piece.

  “Charlie Thorpe’s home,” she said to him as he sat by her bed, holding her hand for all the world as if she were his sweetheart and not his ‘funny-faced’cousin. “It’s terrible to see him limping down Beck-Side Street with a crutch, one empty trouser leg pinned up out of the way. Jenny is being very brave and very practical about it. She says she’d rather have him home and alive with only one leg, than two-legged and dead in Flanders.”

  It was while Harry was home that the news came that Rupert was be awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross.

  “I wrote a sympathy letter to Nina immediately I knew of Rupert’s death,” Harry said, not making eye contact with her but staring intently at a bowl of marigolds on her bedside table. “She knows I’m home and she’s invited me to spend my last couple of days leave in London. Your mother’s kept me in touch with what’s been happening down there. It seems Neen’s taken Rupert’s death very hard.”

  “Yes.” There was such a lump in her throat she could hardly force the word out. She knew what would happen when Harry saw Nina again. Nina would turn to him for comfort and Harry, loving her as he had always loved her, would give that comfort. And then? After Nina had grieved for Rupert, would she and Harry marry? It would be what Harry would want. It was what Harry had always wanted.

  Within days of Harry’s returning to Flanders, via a brief stay with Lizzie and Nina in London, Jenny and Charlie were married in Bull Royd Methodist Church.

  Not having a father, Jenny had asked Walter if he would give her away. “I’d be proud to, my dear,” he had said, deeply touched, knowing how it would set tongues talking and not caring.

  Sitting at the front of the church with her mother and William and Sarah, Rose had had to blink hard to keep tears away as she watched Jenny walk down the short aisle.

  Her wedding-dress was of misty lavender-blue silk. She had made it herself, cleverly cutting the long sweeping skirt on the bias so that it swirled around her ankles. With her hair prettily decorated by crimson roses, a posy of them in her hands, she walked, radiant with happiness, to stand at Charlie’s side.

  There was a card, wishing her and Charlie well, from Noel. Although there was, as yet, only talk of conscription, he had informed the authorities that if and when it came he would be burning his conscription papers and, as that was to be the case, that he would appreciate being delegated without further delay to non-combative war work. No one in the family knew what kind of response he had received to his demand, but the wedding card had been posted from Wales. Micky, too, contacted Jenny on her wedding day. ‘Have a smashing day, stop,’ his censored-marked telegram read. ‘You’re marrying a grand bloke, stop. All best wishes, stop. Micky.’

  “Where the devil is young Micky?” Gertie Graham asked Rose at the wedding reception in the church hall. “Albert says he gets a postcard now and then with bugger all but censor marks on it. If we and the Frenchies get together for a big autumn push as folks are saying we’re going to do, will he be in t’thick of that, do you think? He always did like to be in t’thick of things, didn’t he?”

  In September, taking part in the great autumn offensive on the Western front, Micky was certainly in the thick of things.

  “‘Where’s tha’bin?’ is the first question I shall blooming well ask him, first time he comes home,” Albert grumbled to Lizzie as they studied the late
st news reports from the front in the Bradford Daily Argus. “What the heck’s the use of letting the boys write home, if they can’t say nowt about where they are or what the heck they’re doing?”

  “If he’s taking part in the autumn offensive with the British 1 Corps, he must be in the fighting around Loos,” Lizzie said, spreading out a map of France and Belgium on Sarah’s kitchen table. When they could both see it clearly she returned her attention to the newspaper. “Marshall Joffre is quoted here as saying, ‘After a new and very violent bombardment our infantry rushed forward to assault German lines. The enemy has suffered very considerable losses from our fire and in the hand-to-hand fighting.’”

  “I don’t like t’sound of that,” Albert had said baldly. “Trench fighting’s bad enough, but’and-to-’and is worse. Still, if anyone’ll get the Germans running for’ome, it’s our Micky. ’E’as a devil of a temper when’e’s roused!”

  The offensive failed. No ground worth mentioning was taken – and that which was taken was subsequently lost. British casualties amounted to over 60,000, but Micky Porritt was not among them. To the vast relief of his family and friends Micky Porritt, cursing like a trooper and clinging to the dream of a sheep-farm half a world away, lived to fight another day. And another. And another.

  “Harry was right, wasn’t he, when he said it wouldn’t even be over by this Christmas?” Rose said to Walter as he drove her home from the mill in the Renault. “And not only is it not going to be over by this Christmas, there doesn’t look much chance of it being over by next Christmas. Not unless this terrible stalemate is broken.”

  The weather was so cold she was wearing her cossack-style hat and matching muff.

  “It has to be broken,” Walter said grimly, aware that luck couldn’t continue to favour Harry indefinitely. “The new Ministry of Munitions might be the trick. Now its formed, the army in France should have all the supplies they need.”