‘Laura, how could I speak to him? What would I say?’ Tom sounded shocked.
‘I would have done. I would have told him how wonderful I thought his plans for the National Health Service were and—’
‘Well, maybe, but I’m not you. But Laura, I did smile at him, and he smiled back, in a really friendly way. Imagine, Aneurin Bevan, smiling at me. He’s not very tall, and he has this very thick grey hair, and he was wearing what looked like quite an expensive suit, and very well-polished shoes. I did notice that.’
‘Well, I hope he polishes them himself and doesn’t expect his wife to,’ said Laura briskly. ‘I’m very happy for you, Tom, really. But I still have lots of work to do, and we have supper to eat, so however wonderful your day has been, and I can see it has, we can’t sit here talking about Aneurin Bevan all night. Much as I daresay you’d like to. And did you get the book I wanted, about the suffragettes? Because I’m going to start telling the girls about them in the next history lesson.’
Tom said he had and came slowly back to earth.
Chapter 11
1947
It was in early February that the telegram came – at the heart of the harshest winter in living memory, the snow relentless, day after day, blocking roads, railways, cutting off villages. It found its way, that awful winter, into every corner of society, every life, old and young; there was no one unaffected. Coal, its stocks low after the war, struggled to get through to power stations, many of them shut for lack of fuel. Much of the fuel that was there was stockpiled, stuck for lack of functioning transport. The government was introducing draconian measures, restricting domestic consumption, cutting industrial supplies. Factories were being shut down, and unemployment followed. People were cold, and they were hungry, food also being held up by the same relentless lack of transport. It was a wretched time for a nation already exhausted and demoralised by six years of war.
Tom was making his way home through the driving sleet. He walked carefully, for tonight he was making a speech; it would never do if the speaker fell and broke his leg before he even got there. The speech was on a subject very dear to his heart: the shocking lack of hospital provision for wounded servicemen, and indeed care of any sort. He was looking forward to it, despite being terrified, for he had a far bigger audience than he was used to, including some dignitaries from the council, and two representatives of the board of Hilchester Hospital. The Hilchester Post was sending a reporter. It was a seriously important meeting and its success would be down to him. Then, as he rounded the corner, he saw the telegram boy on their doorstep, looking up and down the street, clearly about to leave again.
He waved at him, hurried forward as fast as he dared, took the yellow envelope, opened it with clumsy fearful fingers.
Dad ill. Pneumonia. Come when you can. Mother.
Helpless with fear, panic making him indecisive, he asked Laura what to do: should he go at once, or should he stay and give his speech, and go in the morning?
‘I just can’t tell how bad he is. I don’t want to let all these people down tonight, it’s so important. But he must be bad for Mother to send a telegram. Suppose he died and I wasn’t there? I’ll never get there anyway, tonight. Tell me what to do, Laura, please.’
And Laura, as always the embodiment of calm and common sense, told him not to go tonight. ‘There’s more snow forecast, none of the buses are running. You can go in the morning. We’ll send a telegram to your mother first thing, so she knows you’re coming.’
‘But she’ll be waiting for me, hoping I’ll come tonight. I need to make contact with her She’ll be so frightened and—’
‘She has the girls,’ said Laura, ‘she won’t be alone. And Arthur too, he lives in the village. He’ll be with her. Do you know anyone in the village with a telephone? Anyone at all.’
‘The vicar,’ said Tom. ‘But then he’d have to walk down to the cottage, and—’
‘If he has any goodness in him, which he most certainly should have, he will walk down to your parents’ cottage. It’s not exactly far. Now, let’s go to the phone box and ring him. He might even know how your father is.’
So Tom spoke to the vicar, who not only showed that he did have some goodness in him, and said of course he would go down to the Knelstons’ cottage, but added that he had called in that afternoon and Mr Knelston hadn’t seemed too bad, although obviously not at all well, and the doctor had been and was coming again in the morning. ‘Don’t think of coming tonight, Tom. It’s starting to snow really hard and none of the buses are running.’
‘There,’ said Laura when he passed this information on. ‘You see. Not so bad. Now, come on, you’re going to be late for your speech if you don’t get a move on.’
‘Laura I – I don’t know if—’
‘Tom,’ said Laura firmly. ‘I think I know what you were going to say and if I’m right, then you mustn’t even think it. Do you think your Mr Bevan would not give a speech he had promised, however worried he was about something else?’
Thus it was that Tom Knelston gave a speech of such passion, increased by his own distress, that the women in the audience were moved to tears, and even a few of the men blew their noses quite hard. ‘These men gave their youth, their health, their future, for this country and now they have been abandoned, it seems, many of them, despite the best efforts of the Disability Employment Act, left literally on the streets to beg. Some of them, you’ll have seen them, legless, with rubber tyres on their knees so they can shuffle along, and other poor souls, airmen, with their dreadfully burnt faces, so bad that people turn away from them, no hope of getting work ever. There is help out there, but not enough; not for many of them, with false legs or arms, nor with their chronic bronchitis caused by lungs damaged by shellfire. Nor with their permanent pain from bones improperly set in the field hospitals. They should be a top priority, yet they have been sent to the back of the queue, by the medical profession and the government, and it’s shocking that it should be our government, our Labour government, to whom we entrusted our hopes and our future. They should be ashamed, discarding these men like so much litter not fit for their consideration. Not the heroes they were, fighting so bravely and so selflessly.’
They heard him out in utter silence, and when he had finally finished, flushed, exhausted, close to tears himself, they rose and applauded. The reporter from the Hilchester Post, who had indeed come, rushed to speak to Tom to get further quotes and said he would make it his lead story that Saturday, and the two board members from the hospital, looking rather shamefaced, said they would do everything in their power to bring the plight of the soldiers to the attention of the regional board.
‘Now when – and please God it will be soon – Mr Bevan’s National Health Service comes in, we shall see a change, of course. They have promised rehabilitation services and not only to the war wounded, but those injured in industrial accidents. Then everyone will get the medical care they deserve,’ said Tom fervently. ‘But we have to be vigilant, we cannot afford to be complacent, to leave it to the government and the NHS. With the best will in the world, their efforts may not be enough – the problem is too great.’ The reporter made a note and resolved to make it an important feature of his article.
‘You were wonderful,’ said Laura when finally they got back to the flat. ‘Wonderful. I was so proud of you. Now, you must go straight to bed. I’ll bring you some cocoa to help you sleep – I’m afraid you’re going to have a terribly long and difficult day tomorrow.’
She shooed him off to bed, but in spite of the cocoa, Tom hardly slept; he felt exalted by what he had done that night, held the room in his hand, taken hold of its consciousness and moulded it to his will; it was heady, astonishing stuff, and he could hardly believe it had been possible. Then, as the adrenalin slowly left him, fear for his father and remorse that he had not at least tried to get to him that night took over.
It was also the first time his professional and his personal life had been in any kind of con
flict. He had experienced a shot of regret, swiftly crushed but there nonetheless, that he might miss the chance to make his mark if he set off for West Hilton. He was to look back on that night, down the years, recognising it as a kind of watershed.
‘Mummy! Mummy, come up here quickly, please. Look, look –’
Diana was standing in her bedroom, white with fear, a pool of liquid at her feet. ‘It’ s – is it? Oh, it can’t be, surely, not my waters breaking? It’s three weeks early – suppose something’s wrong? Oh, God, suppose I hadn’t come in time?’
‘Well, you did, and darling, try to keep calm. Panicking won’t help. It’s a perfectly normal start to labour, it happened to me with Michael.’
‘We must get up to London at once, now, please go and ring Sir Harold.’
‘Diana – darling –’ Caroline hesitated. ‘Darling, I don’t think it’s remotely possible for you to get to London tonight. The snow is really deep, all the trains have been cancelled.’
‘Then we must drive.’
‘I’m afraid that’s out of the question. Half the roads are blocked. We’d never get there – you’d end up having your baby in a snowdrift.’
‘But – but we’ve got to. Just got to. I can’t have this baby without Sir Harold. Maybe he can get here.’
‘Of course he can’t. If we can’t get there.’
‘Oh, God,’ Diana tensed suddenly, gripping her stomach. ‘God, it’s a pain, it hurts, it hurts. Oh, Mummy, it’s starting, what are we going to do?’
‘First, you must lie down and try to relax. I’ll go and phone Dr Parker, he’ll be able to get here.’
‘No, no, don’t leave me – and not Dr Parker, don’t be ridiculous. What does he know about childbirth?’
‘Quite a lot,’ said Caroline briskly. ‘He delivers at least two or three every month – sometimes, so he told me, in cottage bedrooms so small he can hardly move. He’ll look after you.’
‘He can’t, he can’t!’ Diana’s voice rose in a wail. ‘I can’t have this baby here, with Dr Parker. I’ll die!’
‘Diana, you will not die. Please try to calm down, you’re being ridiculous.’
‘But what about the pain? Sir Harold told me he had this stuff, he promised me, gas and air, it stops the pain. I have to get to him, Mummy, please. Oh, God, there’s another pain coming. Oh, it’s so bad, so bad.’
Dr Parker said he would come later, of course, when Mrs Gunning was further advanced in her labour, but it was quite a walk through the snow, and he had at least two other visits to make, so meanwhile he would send for Nurse Timmings, who was a qualified midwife.
‘I don’t suppose Nurse Timmings has a gas and air machine?’ said Caroline. ‘Diana is, well, very nervous, and her London obstetrician had assured her she could have it.’
‘Yes, yes, of course she does,’ said Dr Parker, and there was an edge to his voice. ‘We may not have rooms in Harley Street, Lady Southcott, but we are not quite in the Dark Ages. You’d be surprised, we seldom deliver babies in ditches …’
‘No, no, of course not,’ said Caroline, apologetically. ‘I just – well, thank you so much, Dr Parker. I’ll be very pleased to see Nurse Timmings, and even more pleased to see you. I—’ She was interrupted by another wail from upstairs. ‘I think Diana’s labour might be progressing faster than usual for a first baby. I hope Nurse Timmings will be here in time and I don’t have to deliver it myself.’
‘Most unlikely,’ said Dr Parker. ‘But yes, I’ll ring her straight away. And I’ll see you later.’
Diana had finally become pregnant in the early summer, when even she found Yorkshire suddenly beautiful; when the farm was alive again, the fields filled for miles and miles with tentative shoots of bright green; when lambs, hundreds of the pretty playful things, filled the fields near the house; when the sun shone, and the wind grew warmer, and the trees in the orchards were covered in flowers; and she took out her horse, her southern-bred horse, as pleased with the improved weather as she was. She rode through the countryside, smiling at last, and discovered its lovely secrets, its steep rocky foaming waterfalls, its sudden woods and pools, its low stone walls studding the countryside like so many pictures in a child’s book; where she could gallop for miles across the huge rolling sheets of land that were the moors, rich with brilliant gorse and where, when she stopped, she could hear bees, working in that gorse, and the raw cries of curlews, and the calls of the cuckoo too, that made her feel at home. She would arrive home happily, sweetly tired, and wait for Johnathan’s return when twilight fell.
And he, happy at her happiness, just as he had felt despair at her despair, fell freshly, if slightly tentatively, in love with her again, and they would make love, half surprised that they should want to, night after night. And – to both their absolute delight, and even the rather grudging pleasure of Vanessa, she had become pregnant, swiftly and easily.
But there was a shadow over her happiness: a terror of childbirth, induced by finding, at the age of eleven, when she was just becoming aware of such things, a book of her mother’s describing the pain, the need for a labouring mother to have a sheet tied to the bed to cling to when the pains were at their height. One sentence in particular had haunted her ever since: The moment of greatest agony being the birth of the head. She would look at pregnant women and wonder how they could smile, speak, even. With this inescapable ordeal ahead of her, and the prospect of giving birth to her own child filling her with dread, she had insisted on having the baby in London, in care of the excellent and prominent obstetrician who had delivered her and her brothers. Sir Harold Morton was no longer young, but he was exactly what she needed: reassuring, and calm, but dismissive of her fears, and he had promised her he would personally be with her through her confinement. Lady Gunning was deeply disapproving, having given birth to all three sons in her own bed, but Diana really didn’t care. She was booked into Sir Harold’s private clinic in Welbeck Street, and Johnathan had agreed that she should move down to stay with her parents until the baby was born. The thought of spending several weeks away from Guildford Park and Lady Gunning, and living in comparatively close proximity to London, almost outweighed her horror of childbirth.
‘It was shocking, her behaviour,’ Nurse Timmings told one of the other district nurses later. ‘The fuss! She screamed, she shouted and she swore. I’ve never heard anything like the language. She told me I didn’t know what I was doing, ordered me to phone every house in the village to find Dr Parker. Well, of course I didn’t. She refused to cooperate, wouldn’t try to relax, try to breathe properly; she kicked me when I was examining her, told me I was hurting her!’
‘Did Dr Parker ever get there?’
‘He did. But too late. Baby Gunning had arrived, and then she was all sweetness and light, of course. She apologised for the way she’d behaved, thanked me for everything I’d done.’
‘And was the baby a boy or a girl?’
‘Boy. Fine little chap, seven and a half pounds. But if she has another, I’m not delivering it!’
‘Do you think they’re all like that, the aristocracy? You’d think they should set an example.’
‘No, I delivered Lady Smithe’s baby and she never made a sound all the way through, so brave she was; it was a very long labour, and the baby weighed nine and a half pounds. Now she’s what I call a proper lady, but oh, no, this one was in a class of her own. A disgrace. An absolute disgrace.’
‘I was a disgrace, wasn’t I?’ said Diana ruefully, looking at her mother over James Gunning’s downy head. ‘I really didn’t behave very well. Not exactly brave. I’m sorry, Mummy.’
‘Oh, darling, don’t be silly. I didn’t mind,’ said Caroline untruthfully, for she had been ashamed of her daughter, in particular with the swearing. She could remember the birth of all her babies, and she had managed to remain silent, and there had been no gas and air then, just a whiff of chloroform towards the very end. ‘How are you feeling this morning?’
‘Oh – fine. I’m
just being lazy. I’ll be up soon. This maternity nurse is marvellous. So clever of you to find her so quickly. She just lets me sleep right through, gives Jamie bottles. Three last night – imagine if I’d had to do that, get up and everything, I’d be exhausted.’
‘He is very sweet,’ said Caroline, smiling down at her grandson. ‘Such a shame Johnathan can’t get here to see him.’
‘I know. But they’re completely snowed in. I’ve described him very carefully. Awful we can’t even get some snaps developed to send. Thank goodness I’m here, though – it would be awful if I was up there with only Her for company and no escape. It’s been so lovely, being with you and Daddy, and we’re here for a while longer, I’m afraid. We’re lucky, aren’t we, Jamie?’
‘Well, it’s lovely for us. Oh, dear, the milkman had some sad news – wonderful how he’s managing to get round most, although we’re down to one pint a day now, there’s a real shortage – Jack Knelston, the postman, has died, apparently. He was such a nice chap. So reliable. It’s the funeral tomorrow. I thought I’d write a note to Mrs Knelston.’
‘Oh, yes, he was a nice man. And his son, the oldest one, did rather well, went to the grammar school. Michael said he was very good at cricket.’
She was silent, the image of Tom digging out the drain suddenly vivid in her memory. How good-looking she had thought him, with his wild auburn hair and amazing green eyes. Probably wouldn’t look so good to her now, of course. She’d met a few really good-looking men over the past few years.
It had taken Tom almost eight hours to get home to West Hilton. One bus was running, over-packed with people, and the conductor would have refused him had he not explained his desperate need to get home. That took him almost to East Hilton; after that he had to walk. It was only four miles, but it was heavy going; the snow was deep, although the snow plough had cleared it once, only to have it blocked again two days later. He got a lift on a tractor for a couple of miles; the farmer was in despair. ‘All the sheep are getting buried in the snow – most of the ones I find are already dead. We’re going to lose most of the flock, and that means the lambs too. Don’t know how we’ll survive this year, I really don’t. We’re ruined already and it’s only just begun. As for the cattle …’
A Question of Trust Page 11