All Among the Barley

by Melissa Harrison

  ‘Oh, he did well out of oats just after the War.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘Everyone knows – well, ’cept you.’

  I wondered whether Sid or Alf had told Frank about their father’s money, but it didn’t seem likely. Apart from the cost of feed and wages, and the prices fetched for beasts and corn at market, money in the abstract – profit and loss, their balance sheet, the future – was something farmers never discussed outside of their families, and neither would their sons; so that often, the first the district knew about a man in real trouble was when a notice of sale appeared in the Gazette, as seemed to happen more and more often in those hard years. No, it seemed to me that wherever they were said to have come from, Rose’s fabled riches could be no more than village gossip, which as often as not was wide of the mark.

  On the other side of the field we left Rose Farm and ducked through a gap in a tall hedge to where a straight path ran west for a mile, flanked on each side by hazels and young oaks. Father said that before the War it had been a lane of rolled stone with a good, deep ditch on each side for drainage; now, though, it was just a narrow path overarched by trees. The hazels had not been coppiced for many years and had grown and spread to form huge stools, and cow parsley stood thick around them; the ground was covered in dog’s mercury and ramsons, dying back. The dauby clay that was now the path’s surface made a click-click sound under our feet as though in the heat it were dry-mouthed; on each side of the cool path, through gaps in the rampant June growth, the green barley blazed.

  As we walked I thought about wealth and what it might mean to have it – beyond the chance to pay for outside labour to keep your cornfields free of weeds. Mrs Rose still scrubbed the floors, for they had no char; Mr Rose’s black Sunday jacket was so old it looked green in certain lights, and apart from the fact that they were allowed comics, his sons had been raised no differently to Frank. Perhaps it was about the future rather than the present, though – not having to concern yourself with what was to come, or worry about having a bad year, as we did.

  I wondered if we were poor – if we were getting poorer. It was impossible to say. I knew, of course, that last year’s harvest had been bad and that Father feared that it would be so again, but how far his worry was out of the common run of things I couldn’t yet tell. Farmers must always worry, for whether they prosper is subject to God, and the weather – and to the government, now.

  ‘Farming from Whitehall, that’s what it is,’ Father would say at the announcement of yet more tinkering with wages, or prices, or agricultural policy. ‘A man should be able to farm his own land as he likes’ – and he would fling the newspaper down in disgust. He had never forgiven Lloyd George for repealing the Corn Production Act in 1921, and never trusted a politician after. Although he said he was a Conservative, in line with the Lyttletons to whom we paid rent, he didn’t vote, but paid his N.F.U. dues and expected them to represent him. Mary told me that when he discovered that Mother had cast a ballot for Stanley Baldwin he caught her a slap that split her lip – though it would have been the same, I now believe, had she voted the other way.

  When at last we emerged from the shade of the trees, the light on the river was blinding. I was wearing my bathing costume under my clothes, and while Frank took off his knapsack and began to unpack it I unbuttoned my blouse and kicked off my shoes.

  ‘Are you going straight in?’ Frank asked, looking up from where he knelt on the riverbank, shielding his eyes.

  ‘Yes, I’m roasting. Aren’t you?’

  ‘All right. But be careful, Ed. I’m not fishing you out if you drown.’

  The back of his shirt was dark with sweat where the knapsack had rested, and he took it off and spread it on the grass for the sun to dry. His forearms and neck were nut-brown, the rest of his body pale and strong. I passed him his trunks and he stepped into them and fastened the belt at his waist; then he looked for a moment at the bright river, and turned to grin at me. ‘Last one in’s a sissy!’ he yelled, and jumped in.

  God, the way it can fizz up through you sometimes – happiness, I mean. The sun, and dear Frank in the Stound there, laughing; the cold river-water making my heart rise in my chest as I waded cautiously in. My feet sank into silt as black and fine as a powder pigment; it plumed up so softly and treacherously that I took a breath and quickly leaned forward into my usual awkward breaststroke.

  ‘Isn’t it rare!’ Frank shouted. His hair was plastered down and he looked foolish; with both hands he flung a furl of bright water at me, splashing my face and making me gasp.

  ‘Beast!’ I shouted back, laughing.

  We floated on our backs for a few minutes, and then Frank swam downstream to look for moorhen nests. After a while I hauled myself out and sat on the bank waiting for the river mud to dry on my legs so I could brush it off. It was hot, and I lay back on my elbows and saw through half-closed eyes a cobalt kingfisher shoot upstream, calling peep. It was low over the water, and almost close enough for me to touch.

  When Frank returned we ate our sandwiches and drank warm lemonade. He belched and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and I began to tell him off but belched too, and then I was helpless with laughter. Every time it began to subside Frank belched, and set me off again. Once he would have tickled me until I begged him to stop, but we didn’t do that any more.

  ‘You know, Ed, you could be pretty if you tried,’ he said at last. He was lying back on his elbows and watching the river slip by, green weeds starred with little flowers trailing in the current like the picture of Ophelia that Miss Carter had shown us in school.

  ‘Oh, give over, Frank.’

  I sat up and began to drag a comb through my wet hair. What he had said was categorically untrue; while Mary had always been pretty, and took after Mother, I had inherited far more of Father’s looks – and I had his short, stout legs and broad shoulders, too.

  ‘It doesn’t matter what I look like, does it?’

  ‘Well, it might do. Happen it will, soon.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, you know. You might want a sweetheart one day.’

  I stared at him. ‘A sweetheart? Frank, I’ve only just finished with school.’

  ‘Mary was walking out with Clive at fourteen.’

  ‘I’m not Mary. Why, do you have a sweetheart? I suppose you do. Who is it? Tell me!’ I lay back down again and pinched his arm.

  ‘Ow, get off. And never you mind about me. Just – don’t let Mother keep you at home, that’s all. If you don’t want to marry yet, you could study. You could be a teacher, or a nurse, or – or something. Lord knows you’re brainy enough.’

  I knew then that he wasn’t teasing, that this was something he had thought about, and planned to say.

  ‘Mother doesn’t keep me at home, Frank. Whatever do you mean?’

  ‘Well, you’ve never even been to a dance. You don’t have any proper grown-up clothes. She keeps it from you, Ed, that’s what I mean. She keeps you at the farm, but you can’t stay at home forever. Something will happen next, and you should choose it – that’s all.’

  I knew he was right, and yet my mind shied away from his words as it always did when I tried to picture myself as an adult, living far away from the farm. I knew that I didn’t want to be a teacher, for I thought children were exasperating, with their helplessness and neediness and inability to endure their own company, as I had learned to do. It was true I hadn’t been to a dance, but then I’d never wanted to; I wasn’t interested in frocks or fashions the way Mary had been, but that was hardly Mother’s doing. Was it?

  The mud was tightening and turning grey around the fine hairs on my calves, and I began to pick it off. Frank was eating an apple; I knew already that he would eat the core in two bites, and then flick the stem into the river.

  ‘Alfie Rose would take you to a dance, Ed. If you wanted to go.’

  I pictured the way Alf looked at me when he made me go and meet him in the barn, or
behind the elms. ‘I don’t want to,’ I said.

  ‘Think about it.’

  ‘I already have. And why are you so interested all of a sudden, anyway?’

  ‘I’m not! It’s all the same to me. Now, I’m going to fish – unless you’re planning to swim again.’

  ‘I might have a dip in a bit. Why?’

  ‘Mother said I’m to stay with you if you swim in case you get a cramp, that’s all.’

  ‘Oh, for goodness’ sakes, Frank. I’m not delicate any more.’

  I had Lolly Willowes in my bag, and I took it out and rolled onto my front to read. But after a while my eyelids grew heavy, and without even waiting for a line of seven words I laid my head down on my arms and slept.

  I have no memory of having had diphtheria, but something Frank once said has always stuck in my mind. He called me over to a bucket in the yard one morning when I was about eight or nine years old to show me a frog that had fallen in overnight and got stuck. It floated on its back in the morning sun, white and cold and bloated.

  ‘That’s what you looked like,’ he said, dunking it with a stick. We watched it bob back up, and I knew straight away what he meant.

  ‘All puffed up, like you were drowning.’

  He scooped the frog out in both hands, gently, and we carried it to the garden and buried it under the raspberry canes, where Frank muttered some solemn words over the grave that he said were holy and Latin and that I was too stupid to understand.

  He was right about the frog in a way, for I had been drowning: diphtheria strangles children, slowly swelling their throats and stopping their speech and breath. I don’t know why I was spared, or how Mother got me through it – what bargains or sacrifices she made. She was haunted, perhaps, by her other dead children: the first-born boy she lost in infancy, and the baby before me that was born dead. Neither do I know why I should have been struck down with diphtheria in the first place, when neither Frank nor Mary ever had a day’s illness bar the usual childhood cuts and scrapes, and I don’t recall Mother or Father ever being laid up, there being always too much to do. I do know that John spread straw in the yard so that I wouldn’t be disturbed by the sound of hooves and cart-wheels; and when the crisis was past and I at last regained my voice he was the only grown-up at Wych Farm who didn’t continue to treat me as though I was in some way helpless – something I eventually began to believe myself.

  ‘Leave her be, Ada,’ he’d tell Mother as she wrapped me in scarves on a mild September morning, or slapped the back of my legs for climbing the big oak in the lane with Frank. ‘She’ll outlast the rest of us, you mark my words.’

  Frank and I set off to walk home at about four. It was still hot and bright, but the sun was no longer overhead and the yellow irises by the water were casting shadows like black swords on the bank. We walked with the sun behind us and I felt it warm on my calves where the skin had begun to turn red as I slept. There was calamine lotion at home, pink and chalky and soothing. When we got back I would ask Mother where it was.

  ‘When’s that woman coming back? Constance FitzAllen, I mean,’ Frank asked.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Didn’t you ask?’

  ‘No, I – I didn’t get the chance, somehow.’

  He laughed. ‘No, she’s a bossy one, and that’s a fact! No wonder she can’t catch a man.’

  ‘She’s going to be an author, you know. That’s why she’s here – she wants to write about the countryside.’

  ‘She’ll tire of it soon enough, I’ll wager. You know she’s a neurasthenic? That’s what they’re saying in the village, anyway.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘It’s a rich person’s condition. It just means they’re bored, or they’ve got a case of nerves, from what I can make out. They go to the country to get better – like a rest cure.’

  I couldn’t help but laugh at that. ‘Rest? On a farm?’

  ‘Oh, you know – fresh air, going back to the land: “I’m Happy When I’m Hiking” and the Woodcraft Folk. Father says it’s all Socialist nonsense, anyway.’

  ‘Do you think she’s rich, then?’ I asked.

  ‘Course she is. She’s from London.’

  ‘Not everyone in London is rich, Frank. They’ve got slums, you know; it’s not all – not all debs and jazz and the Ritz.’

  ‘If you think Constance FitzAllen is from a slum, Ed, you’ve got even less sense than I’ve been giving you credit for.’

  ‘I don’t! Oh, never mind. You’re probably right – if she can afford to board with Mrs Eleigh for weeks on end she can’t be short a bob or two. Anyway’ – I took his arm – ‘I don’t mind her. Do you?’

  ‘I don’t know her well enough to mind her,’ he said. ‘I just hope she’s got enough sense not to get in the way.’

  We joined the road again by Hullets’ ruined barn, its once-black timbers grey and gaping, the catastrophe of its roof even more shocking up close. Its horse-pond was entirely choked with yellow flag irises, with barely even a twinkle of water showing through the mass of tall green spears. The house’s black, rotten thatch sagged with the weight of the weeds and house-leeks growing from it, all the glass in the windows was gone, and chunks of pargeting were dropping out from between the timbers like spoiled icing from a cake. It brought to mind the carcass of an animal – and yet I couldn’t look away.

  I suppose that’s why it was me who saw it, and not Frank: a movement at one of the downstairs windows as though someone had been watching us pass through the derelict farm buildings, and had quickly withdrawn from view. I stopped and shaded my eyes, but it didn’t come again, and after a few moments I decided it must have been a trick of the light and hurried to catch up with Frank where he was turning into the lane.

  Back on our own land at last, the summer evening opened itself around us, warm and soft and still. Hulver Wood was loud with throstles and blackbirds and spinks calling one after another after another; there were whitethroats and yellow buntings and all the countless other birds that flocked to the farm and built their nests and raised their young and left, as our barley-birds already had that year – the last year that I would ever hear them sing. Most of the time I hardly noticed the birds, so many were there; but that evening I remember listening to them as we walked down Great Ley in the twilight, their song rising around us from the hedges and thickets and joining with the faint conversation of swallows in the warm air overhead.

  Before going inside I shut up the hens for the night. A few years before, at the advice of a neighbour, Elisabeth Allingham, we had bought four dozen Leghorns and six modern wheeled huts. They were mine and Mary’s responsibility – mine alone now, of course – and poultry proved in those years to be a good investment, despite Father’s scorn.

  In the coop, where I’d left them, two of the landrail’s eggs were cold, but there was a tiny, coal-black chick, downy and awkward, struggling in the nest. I fetched the hen and settled her with it, hoping she’d at least keep it warm for the night.

  IV

  John was not a tall man. He was a full head shorter than Father and a little bow-legged, but he was very strong, his brown arms corded from all his years at the plough. His hair under his cap was sandy and his eyes a pale grey-blue, and he was both utterly familiar to us and yet a mystery – although it’s fair to say that I wondered very little about him in those days, because the world of your childhood is one of fixed points and certainties, or so it seems.

  And John was a fixed point, always level, always kind, but always remote. It was he who found me the day I went missing, when I can’t have been more than two years old. The whole place was in uproar, the way Mother told it; all the farmhouse’s rooms, and the yard and the barn, had been searched. At last John discovered me in the stables, where I had somehow clambered up onto one of the draught horses and fallen soundly to sleep on its back. He did not touch me, but went to fetch Mother; and whenever the story was told he marvelled anew at how I could have done it: ‘And her only
a baby!’ he’d say. I remembered nothing, of course, and so could offer nothing by way of explanation, but I loved to hear my one adventure retold.

  Unlike Doble, whose family had been tied to ours for generations, John was what we in the village called a ‘furriner’, having been born sixty miles or more north of us, where our clay gave way to flat, rich peat. He came from a long line of horsemen, and although he would say nothing of it we knew he had been initiated into their secrets when he’d left school at fourteen, the age that I was now. His own father being hale and strong, and there being several brothers, he had left home not long after to seek work and apart from the War he had been with us ever since. ‘A farmer is no good twenty miles from his own land’, the saying went; but John proved it wrong, for he came to know our land better than any of us by the sheer working of it: by walking the horses across it day in and day out.

  It was Grandfather who had originally taken him on, he to whom John had first answered at Wych Farm, and sometimes still did. But should he have wished to, John could easily have countermanded him, or Father, without saying a word, because he could charm the horses, which meant that nothing could proceed without him.

  I never once saw John and Father drink together at the Bell & Hare, or discuss anything personal beyond the daily running of the farm. Perhaps that is simply how it must be between man and master, or perhaps it was due to the difference in their politics, for when I was quite small I do remember hearing rough words between them, and that was when all the lorry drivers and railwaymen had come out on strike. ‘Damn you, man, you sound like a bloody Bolshevik!’ Father had shouted. ‘Well, happen I am, for all that,’ John had replied.

  The yard, the sheds and barn were Doble’s responsibility, but the stable belonged to John. He slept in a room above the loose-boxes so as to be on hand at all times for the horses, and he kept a little flower-garden, edged with stones, near the vegetable patch; he said he’d learned about flowers in the trenches, which seemed to me a strange thing. Father said it was a waste of good growing earth, but when Mother watered our vegetables she’d also water his roses, larkspur, hollyhocks and forget-me-nots, and sometimes a few blooms found their way into her yellow vase on the kitchen table, where they looked very well.