Cheerfulness Breaks In

by Angela Thirkell

  Mrs. Brandon said vaguely that old friends were such a help and she didn’t know what one would do without them. She then looked so piercingly at Mr. Needham’s neck that he began to wonder if his collar was dirty.

  ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Mr. Miller said you had been ordained lately, and now I see what he meant. I thought he said it was ordained, and I didn’t know what. Of course you are a kind of relation of his now.’

  Mr. Needham, unable to remove his eyes from Mrs. Brandon, said not a relation. It was only, he said, that his father had been at Mr. Miller’s college. He didn’t mean, he added stutteringly, that Mr. Miller had a college, but that Mr. Miller had been at his father’s old college. He then felt that he might have expressed it all better and became dumb.

  ‘I only meant a spiritual relation,’ said Mrs. Brandon, looking, so Mr. Needham thought, exactly like a Murillo Virgin, for that was where his tastes lay. ‘But Mr. and Mrs. Miller will be here soon and will explain everything. You will like Mrs. Miller so much. She was companion to my husband’s old aunt and has been a perfect blessing in the parish. And her father was a clergyman too, but an odious one. I suppose I oughtn’t to say that to you,’ she added, suddenly stricken by conscience, ‘but he was extremely Low Church, so I daresay you won’t mind.’

  ‘Mrs. Brandon,’ said Lydia, who felt that her hostess had had a long enough innings, ‘who are the children? Are you having evacuees?’

  ‘Not exactly,’ said Mrs. Brandon. ‘I mean they aren’t dirty or difficult, so I suppose they really have no right to the name.’

  By severe cross-questioning Lydia managed to get from Mrs. Brandon a fairly reliable account of her guests, but it will save everyone’s time and temper to explain in an omniscient way what had really happened.

  When the question of receiving children from danger zones was first discussed, Mrs. Miller, who had taken on the ungrateful job of Billeting Officer, had been inspired to put all the children—luckily not a very large number, for Pomfret Madrigal was a small village with a very small Church School—into cottagers’ houses. Here the eight shillings and sixpence a week provided for the evacuees by a grateful if bewildered country were extremely welcome and the London children, apart from their natural nostalgia for playing in dirty streets till midnight and living on fish and chips, settled down almost at once into the conditions of licence, dirt, overcrowding and margarine to which they were accustomed. The special Paradise, much envied by such children as were billeted elsewhere, was Grumper’s End, the congested district of Pomfret Madrigal, and in that Paradise the most longed-for house was the Thatchers’. Here Mr. and Mrs. Thatcher, with eight children of their own, found no difficulty in housing four more, and to their hospitable kitchen, where cups of strong tea and bits of tinned salmon were almost always to be had for the asking or the taking, most of Pomfret Madrigal’s twenty evacuated children gravitated. As they only went to school in the morning, the afternoon being kept for the village children, they had played, screamed, fought, made mud pies, or fallen into a little pond covered with green slime for four blissful weeks and all called Mr. and Mrs. Thatcher Daddy and Mummy. As for Percy and Gladys Thatcher, the children of shame of the two eldest Thatcher girls, they had never enjoyed themselves so much in their very young lives. Pulled about in an old soap box on to which Ernie Thatcher their young uncle by shame had fixed wheels, stuffed with the sweets which all the evacuee children bought with postal orders sent every week by their parents, carefully instructed in all the latest bad words fashionable in the select locality round King’s Cross Station from which St. Gingolph’s (C. of E.) School had been evacuated, they became so overbearing that Mr. Thatcher said more than once that he’d have to take the stick to them, while Mrs. Thatcher, feeling that with so many children about everything was all right, went out charing from morning to night, so that what with the money she earned and the money that Edna and Doris, the mothers of the children of shame, were earning as daily helps at the Cow and Sickle, which was doing very well owing to officers’ wives who wanted to be within reach of Sparrowhill Camp, Mr. Thatcher was able to lose more on the dogs than ever and was later to lose in the Football Pools an amount of money that earned him the deep respect of everyone in the Cow and Sickle Tap.

  As for the really difficult children, Mr. and Mrs. Miller, who were as good as gold, had taken them into the Vicarage and though Mrs. Miller had not the faintest hope of reforming them (for she was a very sensible and practical woman) she managed to keep her eye on them to that extent that they found it less trouble on the whole to do what The Lady said. All the jobs she found for them in house or garden were cunningly chosen to include dirt or destruction in some shape, and after a Saturday on which they had helped Cook (of whom they were in as much awe as their natures permitted) to clean out the flues of the kitchen stove, had helped the gardener to fetch a load of pig manure from a neighbouring farm, and to empty the septic tank near his cottage, they all burst into tears at the sight of their parents who came down on Sunday for the day to see them, hit at their mothers, used language to their fathers which surpassed anything that St. Gingolph’s had yet produced, and said they would never go home.

  At the beginning of all this trouble Mrs. Brandon had opened her purse with her customary generosity and said she would do her very best with any children that Mrs. Miller liked to send. But Mrs. Miller, who was as we have said extremely sensible, saw on the faces of Rose the parlourmaid and Nurse, Mrs. Brandon’s faithful and tyrannical ex-nannie, exactly what opposition such a plan would meet. So with great cunning she discovered a little private nursery school which was anxious to get its young pupils out of danger, and taking advantage of a Saturday morning, which was the moment when Mrs. Brandon with Nurse’s help did the fresh flowers for the church, cornered them both up against the chancel rails and describing the school, said she was at her wits’ end where to billet it. In Nurse’s eye she at once saw, as she had hoped, the lust for power over babies, ever near the surface with all good Nannies, quickly rise. With Nurse’s zeal and Mrs. Brandon’s kind toleration, all difficulties were smoothed away, and within a few days ten very young children with two teachers were installed. The Green Room and the Pink Room were turned into dormitories for the children. The teachers were perfectly nice about sleeping one in each dormitory, and were given the Green Dressing-room as a sitting-room for themselves, while the large drawing-room was turned into a school and play-room, with a dining-room curtained off at one end. Mrs. Brandon and Nurse vastly enjoyed the fuss of having the best drawing-room furniture and the carpets stacked away in the spare garage, and furnishing the dormitories and schoolroom. Mrs. Brandon went so far as to say to her son Francis that the teachers had restored her faith in human nature.

  ‘That is impossible, darling,’ said Francis, ‘because in the first place you don’t understand human nature in the least and in the second you can’t restore what you never lost. All I say is, don’t put a refugee into my bedroom when I am waving a sword on the field of glory, or I shan’t be able to come back a handsome though mutilated cripple to drag out my last days in my ancestral home.’

  ‘You know well, Francis, that the Army won’t have you till you are young enough to register,’ said Mrs. Brandon.

  ‘I know what you think you mean, darling,’ said Francis, ‘which comes to much the same thing. What you are trying to say is that I am an aged dodderer, well above military age; damn it,’ he added.

  Any display of temper by Francis was so unusual that his mother was almost perturbed.

  ‘It isn’t that I want to hide you when the recruiting officer comes,’ said Mrs. Brandon, her eyes brimming with unexpected tears—as unexpected to her as they were to her son. ‘But in a wicked kind of way I can’t help being glad that you are still a little over age.’

  ‘You aren’t wicked, bless you,’ said Francis, hugging his mother with one arm, for he had his attaché-case in the other and was just leaving for the office where he worked in Barchester.
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  ‘I couldn’t be anything as definite as that, I suppose,’ said Mrs. Brandon, with one of her rare flashes of insight. ‘And I wouldn’t let a refugee have your room if he were starving.’

  ‘You mustn’t say things like that, mamma,’ said Francis, much shocked, ‘though I must say I’d rather think of an enemy alien in my bed than some of those Mixo-Lydian refugees over at Southbridge. They show a degree of determined ingratitude and unpleasantness that confirms me in my never-wavering belief that Mixo-Lydia will once again be a free and revolting nation. Bless you, darling. I must fly.’

  After this explanation, or digression, it will be easy to see how what Mrs. Brandon nearly always managed to stop herself calling My War Work, was little or no trouble. Nurse, after looking at the teachers with the eye and nostril of a suspicious rocking-horse, and holding aloof in awful politeness for two days, was entirely melted on the third by being begged by Miss Driver, the senior teacher, to come and look at Baby Collis who wasn’t quite the thing. After this she took Miss Driver and Miss Feilding, the second in command, under her wing, superintended much of the children’s toilet and meals, and became so absorbed in what she would to Delia’s indignation call ‘Our Babies’ that she quite forgot to keep up her enmity with Rose, and even allowed the head housemaid to mend Delia’s stockings.

  Rose now announced Mr. and Mrs. Miller. As all their friends know, the Vicar of Pomfret Madrigal and his wife, then Miss Morris, had cared for each other when they were young, had been separated by the very intransigent attitude of Miss Morris’s father, the Rev. Justin Morris, about young Mr. Miller’s High Church tendencies, and had not met for many years. After being companion to several old ladies Miss Morris had gone to old Miss Brandon at Brandon Abbey, and on her employer’s death had been manœuvred by Mrs. Brandon into the Vicar’s company. The middle-aged lovers had made up their minds almost at once and had been married under the eye of Mrs. Brandon who had personally superintended Miss Morris’s wedding outfit (which was a very neatly-cut coat and skirt, a felt hat, crocodile shoes and bag) and insisted on paying for it herself with such real kindness that Miss Morris could not refuse. Mrs. Brandon had also wished to give her an unassuming fox fur, but here Miss Morris was adamant. Not only did the expense seem to her almost wicked, but she had convictions about wearing fur, feeling very strongly that all furbearing animals were skinned alive and left to perish in slow agony while their hapless children starved. In vain did Francis Brandon point out to her that no fur hunter would be so wasteful and that practically all silver foxes were now bred on a commercial scale and well-treated, nay pampered, till the day of their unexpected and painless death. Miss Morris remembered reading something somewhere about ospreys, and went pink whenever the word silver fox was mentioned. So the idea of a fur was abandoned, but Mrs. Brandon got even with the new Mrs. Miller by putting a modern stove and a separate furnace for the hot water into the Vicarage while the Millers were on their honeymoon, which was Oxford, and Stratford-on-Avon, where they saw As You Like It. When the Vicar and his wife got back, Mrs. Miller could only thank Mrs. Brandon with her usual composure but in a tremulous voice, while the Vicar said Indeed, indeed a hot bath every day would be a luxury he had never expected and how truly kind Mrs. Brandon was. He then wondered privately whether the Ecclesiastical Commissioners would mind and hoped they wouldn’t.

  ‘So you are my old friend Needham’s son,’ said the Vicar, very kindly, as he shook the young man by the hand.

  Mr. Needham, eyeing anxiously the cassock which he knew his present employer would strongly disapprove, said Yes in a mumbling sort of way.

  ‘My dear,’ said the Vicar, turning to his wife, ‘this is Needham’s boy. My wife.’

  His pride, even after more than a year of marriage, in those two words, was so great that Mrs. Brandon felt her soul swelling inside her, but wisely said nothing about it.

  Mrs. Miller, who had heard a great deal about Mr. Needham since her husband had discovered that he was secretary to the Dean of Barchester, and was quite prepared to see a young man in a clerical collar, bore up very well and shaking hands said, also in a very pleasant way, that she had heard a great deal about him and was so glad to meet him. Everyone then fell silent, while Lydia looked at the two clergymen with dispassionate interest, rather hoping that they might argue about the Thirty-Nine Articles; for she had been giving her attention to that admirable composition of late and was burning to air her views, but didn’t see how to begin. Mrs. Brandon went on with her embroidery placidly, for she was one of those lucky beings to whom silences are never awkward.

  ‘Ha!’ said Mr. Miller at length. ‘Yes; Needham. He rowed seven in the Lazarus Boat. “Mangle” Needham, we used to call him, but I can’t remember why.’

  Mr. Needham felt himself going crimson from the feet upwards and was dumb.

  ‘How is your father?’ said Mrs. Miller, who as the daughter and wife of the clergy was well used to keeping a mild conversational ball rolling.

  ‘Oh, Father. He’s awfully well, thank you,’ said Mr. Needham. ‘And so’s Mother and both my sisters, and Father said to give his love to Goggers Miller. At least that’s what he said, sir, I hope you don’t mind.’

  He stopped, paralysed by his own fluency. Mrs. Miller was sorry for anyone who so recklessly spent the whole of his small change of conversation in one breath. Mrs. Brandon chose some blue silk and threaded her needle.

  ‘“Goggers”,’ said Mr. Miller, laughing. ‘Indeed, indeed it is many a day since anyone called me by that nickname. I must tell you, my dear,’ he added, turning to his wife, to whom it was his habit, partly from shyness, partly from affection, to address most of his remarks, ‘the story of that name. It was just after the Summer Term of 1911, or possibly 1912. Needham and I and a man called Holroyd-Skinner, he was killed, poor fellow, in the early days of the war and I see his mother from time to time, but owing to her health she lives on the Riviera so it is only on her, alas, too rare visits to England that we meet, rowed down from Oxford to Kingston, spending the night at riverside inns, and on the second day we were discussing St. Thomas Aquinas, and somehow that name stuck to me.’

  It was just as well that Rose announced lunch at that moment, or Mr. Needham, who was not accustomed to Mr. Miller’s manner of speech, might have gone mad. Mrs. Brandon got up, dropping all her embroidery again, which the gentlemen precipitated themselves to pick up.

  ‘What are you working at now, Mrs. Brandon?’ said Mr. Miller.

  ‘Well, I can’t really call it work,’ said Mrs. Brandon as they went into the dining-room, ‘but Nurse made a lot of aprons for our babies of coloured linen, green and blue and yellow and I thought it would look so pretty if I embroidered them, so I am embroidering them. Mr. Miller, you will sit by Lydia, won’t you; and Mr. Needham, come between me and Mrs. Miller. I am so sorry we are five, which is an odd number, but after all there is the Pentateuch, or do I mean Pentagon, isn’t there, Mr. Miller?’

  With which sop to the Church she smiled dazzlingly at her Vicar.

  The excellent food and the excellent light wine soon restored animation and Mr. Miller and Mr. Needham talked happily across the little round table about Oxford. Mr. Miller had not heard that brick boat houses were beginning to supplement and were eventually to replace the barges, and nearly burst with sorrow at the news. The number of ways of getting illegally into Lazarus College was discussed and the Vicar was much interested to hear of a seventh way, unknown in his time and only made possible by the instalment in the Master’s Lodgings of a second bathroom, which provided a drainpipe of very solid construction, a boon to Alpinists. Mrs. Miller and Lydia, wisely ignoring their hostess, discussed the possibility of a working party once a week for such Northbridge and Pomfret Madrigal men as were in the Royal Navy or the Royal Merchant Service, but owing to petrol rationing were not quite sure if it could be arranged. Mrs. Miller said she knew at least five workers who bicycled and Lydia undertook to rally some from South-bridge, and as Mrs. Bran
don had offered her dining-room for the working party, there would be the added attraction of a very good tea. After that Mrs. Miller and Mrs. Brandon had a very interesting conversation about the Vicarage stove, during which Mrs. Brandon showed great intelligence, while Lydia listened attentively, conceiving kitchen stoves to be part of her self-appointed work.

  Just as they were finishing lunch, Rose came in and said Could Sir Edmund Pridham see Mrs. Brandon.

  ‘Well, he could if he came in,’ said Mrs. Brandon, who was always pleased to see her old friend and trustee, now busier than ever, if that were possible, over committees of all sorts and every job that called for a great deal of work and no pay. ‘Come in and have coffee, Sir Edmund. Here are the Millers, and you know Lydia Keith. And this is Mr. Needham who came over with Lydia.’

  ‘Another of your young men, eh, Miss Lydia?’ said Sir Edmund, who stuck to this charming if demoded address for young unmarried ladies.

  ‘Of course not, Sir Edmund,’ said Mrs. Brandon severely. ‘Mr. Needham is a clergyman, as you would see if you looked at him.’

  ‘Afternoon, Mr. Needham,’ said Sir Edmund, sitting down heavily between Mrs. Brandon and Mr. Miller. ‘No; no coffee, Lavinia. Makes me bilious after lunch. I won’t say no to a glass of port. Nothing to be ashamed of if you were. Parsons often carry off the prettiest girls, eh, Miller?’ said Sir Edmund, poking his Vicar in the waistcoat, or about where the waistcoat, under a cassock, would be.

  Mr. Miller felt, as he often did, that if his valued and excellent Churchwarden could not control himself, he would have to give notice. But Sir Edmund’s poke was, he knew, intended to imply that he, Mr. Miller, had carried off one of the prettiest girls, and as in his eyes his middle-aged wife was still the girl whose windblown hair he had gently put aside on the day of the Church Lads’ Brigade tea, more than a quarter of a century ago, he could not find it in his heart to chide Sir Edmund, and certainly had not the courage to do so.