All Among the Barley

by Melissa Harrison

  The Lyttletons were our ‘people’ and had once been known as good landlords, endowing the village with a schoolroom and keeping the labourers’ cottages decent and the roads in good repair. But the eldest of the two sons had died, and his father soon after; the younger son, Cecil, who lived in London, was rumoured to be part of a rather fast set – or so the village said. When Lady Lyttleton passed away, not long after I was born, the Hall was shuttered up; for as long as I could remember it had stood empty, and from time to time there was talk of its sale. The tenant farmers like Father found life harder under an absentee landlord, although Sir Cecil, via his agent, was not remiss in the collection of rents.

  Every year, between haymaking and harvest, the village held a fete in the grounds of the Hall. Sir Cecil would return from London and take up residence for a week so that he could oversee the preparations; afterwards we wouldn’t see him again until November, when he came back to hunt. It wasn’t much, I suppose, but we enjoyed it: there was a flower show and a band, a coconut shy and a tombola, and all the village turned out for the day. I was half looking forward to it, half plagued by dread, because it was an event where groups of friends generally larked about together, and I didn’t have anyone to walk around with. But perhaps Mary would walk over from Monks Tye for it this year, or we could always offer to fetch her in the trap; perhaps Mother would agree to mind the baby, and she and I could be sisters for a little while again.

  Connie and I propped our bicycles against one of the stone gateposts and I showed her how easy it was, if you turned sideways, to slip through the ironwork gates.

  ‘Gosh – I suppose all Elmbourne’s young ne’er-do-wells must sneak in and get up to no good!’ she said, angling her tall frame through.

  ‘Actually, I’ve never seen another living soul in here – apart from at the fete, of course,’ I replied. ‘The sexton comes and cuts the grass and keeps an eye on things, but there never seems to be anybody about. At school everyone used to say it was haunted, you see.’

  ‘Haunted? But how wonderful! You must tell me more – a black dog, or the Wild Hunt? It’s fascinating to think how all these funny little folk tales spring up. I may well write something about them; they’re the wellspring of the nation’s character, I feel.’

  We were walking up the carriage ride with its centre seam of weeds, which led in a sweeping curve to the big, blank-windowed Hall.

  ‘No – it’s Lord Lyttleton,’ I said. ‘He shot himself in his study after the telegram came saying his son had been killed at Ypres.’

  When at last we arrived back in the village I thought we would bicycle to the draper’s and part company there, but instead Connie dismounted outside the Bell & Hare. I stood uncertainly astride my bicycle as she raked her fingers through her hair in an attempt to tidy it. She was clearly intending to go in.

  ‘Aren’t you coming, Edie? You must be parched – I know I am.’

  ‘Oh – no, I won’t.’

  ‘Really? Let me at least buy you a lemonade.’

  I tried to picture it: the two of us standing at the bar of the inn, like men. She would drink beer, I was sure of it.

  ‘I can’t, Connie. I’m sorry. I should get back.’

  She looked at me a long moment, and then stuck out her hand and grinned.

  ‘Very well, darling. Jusqu’à demain,’ she said.

  Alf Rose was at the four-a-leet; I couldn’t tell if he was waiting for me, or just happened to be walking over from Rose Farm. My heart sank a little; I stopped pedalling and let my bicycle slow, aware all of a sudden that my face was shiny with perspiration and my hair stringy and tangled. There were probably dark patches under my arms, and I felt my usual wash of shame.

  ‘Hello, Edie,’ he called, and I squeezed the brakes and dismounted. ‘You look fair hot and bothered.’

  We turned into the lane. I wheeled the bicycle between us, trying with my free hand to tuck my hair behind my ears.

  ‘I’ve been out bicycling,’ I said, unnecessarily. ‘Showing Constance FitzAllen around.’

  ‘The famous Miss FitzAllen! What’s she like, then? Frank says she wears britches.’

  I kept my eyes on the ground. ‘Well, she’s . . . I like her,’ I managed. I didn’t know how to explain her to him, and anyway, it sounded from his tone as though he had already made up his mind.

  ‘So where did you take her?’ he asked, opening the gate to our farm. ‘And why didn’t you bring her to see us? You haven’t been over in months.’

  ‘Oh – we ran out of time,’ I said, wheeling the bicycle through. He was right, though: I hadn’t been to Rose Farm in a long while.

  Until he left school, Frank used to wait for me after lessons every day so I could walk home with him and Alf – and when I was even younger, with Mary and Sid too. We Mathers would leave the Rose boys at the four-a-leet, usually, but sometimes we would have our tea at one another’s houses and play for a while or look at comics, which were a much-admired feature of the Rose house, though not of our own.

  It was a surprise the first time Alf kissed me; it was at Rose Farm and I can only have been ten or eleven years old. I had just come out of the privy and didn’t realise that he was there, and he probably surprised himself as much as he did me. At any rate we laughed about it, and later he ragged me that if I said anything he would tell everyone I was fast. As it went on – well, I don’t know how I felt about it, really. Alf was such a nice boy, and everyone liked him, and the attention made me feel as though I was important in some way, I suppose.

  During my final two years at school I would walk home alone, and then I would usually take the quicker route to Wych Farm, down the field path, rather than taking the lane past Rose Farm; I wasn’t avoiding Alf, exactly, I just preferred to walk that way. The kissing was a secret between us, and although there were times when I did think to ask Mary about him touching my chest and putting his hand up my skirt, I suppose I was in some way becoming quite wicked because I wasn’t quite sure if I did really want it to stop. I’d picture how coldly he would look at me if he knew that I’d made such a fuss about nothing, and how I would be forever scorned by him and perhaps by Frank too, if he found out; and then I would tell myself that it was all right really, and quite natural. After all, everyone at home said I was babyish for my age, and so it probably did me good to be made to grow up.

  ‘Awful, awful,’ I muttered to myself involuntarily, and then cleared my throat to cover up the sound I’d made.

  ‘I’d be happy to show her the calves, Edie, if you think she’d be interested,’ Alf said; clearly he hadn’t heard me, which was a relief. ‘We could tell her what we mean to do to modernise; Father’s got plans for a milking herd next year, you know. “Down corn, raise horn” and all that.’

  ‘Oh – I don’t think she’d be much interested in that.’

  ‘Why not?’ he said, bridling a little.

  ‘She’s interested in tradition and history; she says she wants to write about the old ways, not the new. She wants to preserve our ancient way of life here in the village – England is the country, and the country is England, she says.’

  ‘Why, she sounds mazed. There’s nothing round here that people would want to read about in a book.’

  ‘It’s about reconnecting people in towns to the land, she says – to their inheritance.’

  ‘Their inheritance? How is it their inheritance if they haven’t even been born in the country, if they’ve never worked a day in the fields?’

  ‘As a nation. She says the English have become estranged from their birth-right, from the bonds of blood and soil or something. Oh, I don’t know, Alf. I’m going to put my bicycle away.’

  ‘It’s the fete soon, Edie,’ he called after me. ‘Will I see you there?’

  ‘Oh yes, we’re all going,’ I replied.

  In my bedroom, the door latched, the landrail chick peeping in its box, I combed my hair, washed my face and changed out of my dirty dress. I was glad to have got away without him k
issing me, but I felt rattled; I hadn’t been ready to be Connie’s mouthpiece, I wasn’t equipped to defend her, or her ideas. Now it was as though I was allied with her somehow, and although I liked her, and enjoyed spending time with her, I wasn’t yet sure what that meant.

  VI

  Connie went back to London at the week-end for some kind of ‘political do’, as she called it. On the Saturday night there was to be a dance at Monks Tye, to which Frank and the two Rose boys were going; I had stubbornly set myself against it – although if I was honest a part of me did want to go, and a couple of weeks beforehand I might well have said yes.

  ‘She’s like a half-broke horse,’ Father said as he passed through the kitchen where Mother and I were talking on Saturday afternoon. ‘You give her too much choice in the matter, Ada. She should go to the dance with her brother – it’s high time she made some friends her own age. Make the girl see a bit of life.’

  ‘She’s a child yet, George. Let her go another time, when she’s ready,’ she replied, which made me feel relieved – although Frank’s words to me by the river played somewhere at the back of my mind.

  ‘Did you go to lots of dances, Mother? When you were my age?’

  ‘No, child. You and I are alike in that,’ she said, and smiled.

  ‘Why didn’t you?’

  ‘Well, I met your father young, for one thing, and he was never much of a one for gallivanting.’

  ‘But did you want to?’

  She sighed. ‘At the time, yes, if truth be told: I did feel as though I were missing out. But looking back it were probably just as well. The fact of it is, you don’t know how young you are when you’re young, and a pretty girl like I was in those days can get in all sorts of trouble.’

  ‘What kind of trouble?’ I asked, sitting down at the kitchen table. I wanted her to say the things out loud that were trouble; I wanted her to name them, so that I might understand what they were.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. It’s not something you need to worry your head about yet, child.’

  Pollen had fallen from some of John’s flowers in the yellow vase on the table, and I licked a forefinger and began to pick it up.

  ‘Mother, did you used to have a best friend to talk to?’

  ‘Lizzie Allingham was my friend, and still is, God bless her.’

  ‘Did you talk to her about . . . about dances, and sweethearts, and walking out?’

  She laughed. ‘Oh no, Lizzie never had any time for boys. She always said they were only ever after one thing.’

  ‘And you didn’t have any other friends?’

  ‘You know I didn’t, Edie. My mother – your grandmother – well, children can be cruel, and that’s all I’ll say about that.’

  Mother wanted to see Evergreen with Jessie Matthews, which was playing at the Regal in Market Stoundham. So after supper on Saturday night we took the field path to the village and caught the ’bus from outside the Bell & Hare. Once we were seated and the ’bus had rattled off, she took a gilt powder compact from her bag, powdered her nose, and then applied a little lipstick. We didn’t often go to town except on market days, and so it was a treat.

  We had had a good meal of devilled kidneys – Father’s favourite – and it wasn’t long before I found myself dozing off. By the time Mother nudged me awake we were approaching our stop, the ’bus crawling up Sheepdrove amid motor-cars, horse cabs and men on bicycles; the pavements were thronged with girls in modish hats and here and there a tramp returning to the workhouse for the night. It was exciting, bustling; I liked the little town on market day, but I loved it even more in the evenings, when, instead of gathering in for the night, as the countryside did, everything seemed to come alive. It felt there as though anything might happen, which was intoxicating: for in contrast, the farm was a world of ancient and immovable rhythms and beliefs.

  The picture was lavish and exciting, and I can still remember Mother’s rapt face aglow in the flickering light from the screen. During the finale, as the lovely dancing girls kicked their legs, she leaned forward, her lips parted; when the lights went down she sat a while and dabbed at her eyes with her handkerchief, although the ending hadn’t been in the least bit sad.

  ‘Do you need to visit the ladies’ room?’ she asked as we got up and began to make our way to the exit. We had sat for so long that the National Anthem was over, the lights had come up and the usherette was doing the rounds with a canister of Flit.

  I shook my head.

  ‘Go on, now; you’ll only fidget on the ’bus. I’ll meet you on the steps.’

  The ladies’ room was full of young women chattering like sparrows. They reminded me a little of Mary before she was married, but of course they were town girls, and far more sophisticated; doubtless they would have found her rustic and quaint. They crowded the mirror, applying rouge and dabbing lipstick from their teeth. When I moved through them they parted, kindly; but I knew I made barely a ripple in the sparkling current of their night.

  Mother was outside smoking a cigarette, something she did very rarely and only when we were away from the farm. I wondered where she had got it; I was sure she wouldn’t dare keep a packet in her bag.

  ‘Oh, I do so love the pictures. Don’t you?’ she said, taking my arm. ‘To think of it all . . . well. It makes me feel – I can’t quite say. Oh Edie, do you know what I mean?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ I said, although I didn’t; I just couldn’t bear to disappoint her. I had liked the film well enough, and the newsreel had been very interesting, but I could see from her glowing expression that it meant something far greater to her. Once, I had recited Browning’s ‘Home-Thoughts, from Abroad’ in the kitchen, which we had learned by rote in school and which I loved passionately for more than a year; but although she had stood by the range and listened closely I could see no answering feeling in her face. I wondered whether it was just now the same for her – whether she had hoped to share a feeling with me, and was now disappointed. Mary wouldn’t have let her down, I reflected; they both loved going to the Regal. But it was hardly my fault that I preferred poetry to the pictures.

  We didn’t have long to wait for the ’bus, which was the last service back to Elmbourne. Frank was to meet us at the stop and walk home with us, and had been threatened with a hiding from Father if he wasn’t there on time. I wondered what the dance had been like and whether I’d have enjoyed it; whether it would have mattered that I didn’t have any clothes like the girls at the Regal, or whether, it only being a village dance, nobody would mind. I knew there would have been girls and boys my own age there, as well as older ones, and that Frank would have kept me company and not left me with nobody to talk to. Why was it, then, that I hadn’t wanted to go?

  The ’bus appeared, rattling and cheerful, and the other passengers began to climb on board. Mother, though, seemed barely to have noticed, and stood staring past it, up the street.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ I asked, peering. ‘Come on, or we’ll miss it!’

  We climbed on and took our seats, but as the driver pulled away Mother continued to stare out of the window, and it was then that I saw John on the steps of one of the public houses, and pressed up against him a woman in a moth-eaten fur stole, her décolletage on show. I said nothing, and neither did Mother, but the pale moon of her face was reflected, unblinking, in the dark glass of the ’bus window all the way back.

  In Broad Field the beans began to flower and smell sweet. Along our lane and the road to the village hogweed took the place of the spent cow parsley, its creamy blooms busy with soldier beetles making love. Everywhere the paths were narrower now, choked by waist-high nettles, cleavers and meadow grass with its feathery seed-heads. The clover came out in the pastures, and the flat rosettes of plantain and the tiny yellow stars of lesser trefoil carpeted the bare soil at the margins of the wheat.

  Whenever Hullets’ ruined buildings were in view I found myself gazing over, hoping to catch a glimpse of the family living there. But I saw nothing and nobody, an
d Mother was tight-lipped on the subject, only reminding me, when I brought it up, not to gossip in the village or tell tales.

  The landrail chick grew bigger every day, bright-eyed and constantly looking for food. I kept it in my room for fear of the cats that slunk about the yard, and when it wasn’t sleeping it ran around after me, peeping and stumbling on the rag rugs, a dark ball of fluff more like a baby crow than the wheat-coloured, tapestried bird it would become. Each day, after I had seen to the hens, I took it to practise foraging at the field margins, where it would tentatively explore the hedge bottoms, never straying far from where I sat reading a book. Once, when a sparrow-hawk passed over us, I saw it clamp down into the grass; it seemed to have been born with an understanding of where danger might come from, and I wondered how many generations it would be until the mowing-machine would draw from it the same response.

  When John judged that it was strong enough I let the landrail chick go in The Lottens, just near the hedge separating it from Broad Field. There was a ditch half-hidden by brambles and bryony, and at the bottom of it, water; there was plenty of cover, and all the young corn and field beans to explore. It crouched for a moment and seemed uncertain what to do with its new freedom; but when I looked back at the corner of the field, it was gone.

  Connie was back from London and was fast becoming something of a fixture at Wych Farm, so that we no longer remarked much upon it when she rode her bicycle up the lane or knocked at the back door, looking for someone to talk to her about basketry, old-fashioned names of plants, or playground rhymes. She would sometimes find us where we sat at the kitchen table, or she’d pull back the heavy curtain and halloo up the stairs; if there was nobody indoors she’d look in the barn or the vegetable-garden, or try the fields. I became used to seeing her striding towards us, hatless and smiling; it was a welcome distraction from work. And she opened the farm up somehow, too – we became lighter, more genial, around her, as though we were being kindly looked upon by the outside world.