All Among the Barley

by Melissa Harrison

  Only John seemed not to welcome her; he was never rude, but in the face of her questions he became even more taciturn and remote. Of course he told her nothing of the secrets of his trade, as I had warned her he would not; yet she continued, utterly unabashed by his refusals, in her attempt to charm.

  Just once during that time did I see him roused to irritation, and that was when Connie bemoaned the increasing use of tractors on the land.

  ‘I just feel that we’re in danger of losing touch with the soil, and with all the lovely old traditions,’ she’d said. ‘And of course, all these clever machines will eventually put farm labourers out of work.’

  ‘Tradition be damned, Constance,’ he’d flashed back. ‘I’ve seen good men crippled and broke by a life spent out in the fields, and farmers go under for lack of good hands. It may be a – a diversion to people like you, but farming in’t some kind of a game.’

  A familiar red bicycle was leaning by the gate when I returned from releasing the landrail, and I found Connie in the parlour with Grandfather, trying once more to coax him to sing. She had heard from someone at the Bell & Hare that he was the last man in the district to remember all the old ballads, but I could have told her she would be unsuccessful, for according to Mother he had stopped singing the day my grandmother died. They enjoyed talking to one another, though, and so I let it be.

  ‘Hello, Connie,’ I said, sitting on the arm of Grandfather’s chair and taking his hand. ‘Are you with us for the day?’

  ‘If you’ll have me. I plan on making another attempt on your bread oven, if your mother will allow it.’

  ‘Really? On a day like to-day?’

  ‘Yes – I don’t want to wait for winter. Elisabeth Allingham uses hers, did you know? And her house isn’t hot. I was there only the other day.’

  ‘They’re modern, for all that,’ Grandfather interjected.

  ‘Brick bread ovens? Whatever can you mean, Albert?’

  ‘It was my mother’s mother had ours’n put it; it was never part of the original hearth. Acourse, back then you made most things in one great pot over the fire.’

  ‘Yes indeed! I believe Florence White describes that very arrangement in Good Things in England; I’ll get a copy for Ada if she doesn’t have one – it’s all the rage. I don’t suppose your grandmother ever told you in detail about any of the dishes she made, did she? Is there anything in particular you recall?’

  Connie’s pencil was poised over her notebook; she was as alert as the thresher’s terrier when it scented a rat. I stood up.

  ‘I should get on, really – Father’s asked me to pull ragwort to-day.’

  ‘Nasty job,’ said Grandfather. ‘Do you give her a helping hand, Connie. And I’ll speak to Ada about the bread.’

  Connie was clever enough to know a deal when she saw one, and we left Grandfather where he sat by the parlour window, dappled light falling through the elm leaves onto his old face.

  ‘You’ll need some gloves,’ I said, rifling through the coats and boots and bits of tack that had accumulated near the back door.

  ‘Oh, don’t worry about me, Edie – my hands are toughening up rather well.’

  ‘Honestly, Connie, it’s bad stuff. It can poison you through your skin, and it sickens the horses. That’s why we pull it up.’

  I found us a pair each, and we wheeled a barrow out to Horse Leasow. John had been grazing the horses on the Pightle of late, so the grass in the other pasture was growing tall.

  ‘See those – with the yellow flowers? We must get rid of them all now, before they set seed.’

  ‘Such a shame – it’s awfully pretty,’ she said. ‘Do you know, in town they sell bunches of this at the railway stations? They call it “Summer Gold”.’

  I showed her how to grasp each plant at the base and tug it slowly so as not to leave any roots in the ground, and how to spot the young ones, too, that had not yet flowered. We began to walk slowly up the field next to one another, scanning the ground and pausing when one of us found a plant to pull up. One of the cats from the barn appeared, keeping its distance but alert for any harvest mice or voles we flushed from the grass.

  Perhaps it was the fact that we had a job to do, or the way that we were walking in parallel, not looking at one another, but we began to talk of ourselves; not in the way that we had before – an exchange of information, or gentle ribbing – but more seriously, more openly, as though there were not a quarter of a century between us.

  ‘Why did you never marry, Connie?’ I asked her. ‘Was it the War?’

  ‘I didn’t lose a sweetheart, if that’s what you mean. I suppose I never wanted to enough, or I would have made more effort, as all the other girls seemed to. I don’t know. It all just seemed like such a frightful faff.’

  ‘What was the War like? Was it dreadful? John says –’

  ‘Oh darling, please don’t make me talk about it. It was all such a long time ago.’

  I decided not to be put out by the rebuff; after all, her tone was cheerful rather than abrupt.

  ‘Well . . . were you ever in love?’

  ‘Oh, masses of times. I find it passes quite quickly, as long as you keep your head.’

  ‘What’s it like?’

  ‘Oh, well. A bit like champagne, and a bit like a bad case of influenza. It puts you on your back and turns you into a damned fool.’

  I laughed. ‘But don’t you regret not getting married?’

  ‘Not one bit.’

  ‘Didn’t you want babies?’

  ‘I thought I did once, but now I think I just wanted them because you’re supposed to. You know – because everyone does.’

  There was something exhilarating about hearing her speak so forthrightly about the kind of things I hadn’t even dared wonder about in my diary, let alone say out loud. It was irresistible somehow.

  ‘But how can you tell the difference? You know, between wanting them because you really want them, and wanting them so as to fit in with everyone else?’

  ‘Oh! Well, now you’re asking.’

  I thought for a moment. ‘Perhaps – perhaps it’s like being in love; Mary used to say you just know. Perhaps if you’re even wondering whether you want to get married and have babies, it means that you don’t.’

  She laughed. ‘Or perhaps it just means you’re the kind of person who thinks too hard about things.’

  I straightened up for a moment and tried to fasten my hair better, away from the perspiration on the back of my neck.

  ‘I don’t know how to stop, though.’

  ‘Stop what?’

  ‘Thinking too hard. I don’t know how else to be.’ I was surprised to feel my eyes swim with sudden tears.

  ‘Oh Edie, you don’t need to be any different at all, don’t you know that?’ She shaded her eyes to look at me, a fistful of ragwort limp in one glove. ‘You’re utterly exquisite just as you are.’

  ‘No, I’m not, Connie, and you know it. If I was, I’d be popular like you, and I’m not.’

  She didn’t say ‘But everyone likes you!’, for which I was grateful. ‘Look. Other people are fools, Edie – you can’t use them as a measure. Especially around here.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Oh, just that . . . in out-of-the-way places it’s hard to be – different. You’d be quite normal in London, I promise you that.’

  This seemed very unlikely to me, but I let it go, pondering instead her advice about not using other people’s opinions as a measure. There was something valuable in it for me, I felt, if I could only work out how to apply it; but how else was one to learn about oneself other than by trying to perceive one’s appearance, and one’s character, through others’ eyes?

  ‘If it counts for anything, Edie, I think you’re terrific. You’re by far my favourite new friend.’

  ‘Do you mean that?’

  ‘By miles, darling. I’d be long gone, and probably bothering all the farmers at Blaxford and beyond by now, if you and I hadn’t met. And t
hen I wouldn’t know ragwort from sowthistle, or speedwell from forget-me-nots; I wouldn’t be able to say what a landrail sounded like, or a skylark; I wouldn’t know any of the marvellous rhymes you’ve taught me, or the local legends, or anything.’

  We worked in silence for a while as I cautiously turned over the kind things she’d said. I wanted to remember her words exactly, but I wasn’t quite ready to believe them, so new a sensation had they brought. I had grown used to making do with my own company, and in any case it would have done me no good to realise that I was lonely – far better simply to ‘buck up’, as Frank would say whenever I looked glum. So the possibility that I had a friend who thought well of me was something I still felt a little cautious about.

  ‘You miss your sister Mary, don’t you?’ Connie said after a while.

  ‘All the time.’

  ‘Doesn’t she visit?’

  ‘She’s busy now, I suppose, with the house and the baby. And anyway, Mother says Clive doesn’t like her to. He likes her to be at home. I see her at my grandparents’ sometimes, and I go over with Mother to visit now and again – but it’s not the same.’

  ‘No, I can see that.’

  ‘She used to be so much fun. And she was so excited to be getting married. Now she just looks tired.’

  ‘You don’t like this Clive much, do you?’

  ‘No. Well – I don’t know. Mother says I’m jealous.’

  ‘And are you?’

  ‘I suppose, a bit. He was always coming to the house and taking Mary out for walks or to the pictures, and I wasn’t allowed to go. And now he has her all the time, and I can’t ask her anything,’

  ‘What do you want to ask her, Edie?’

  ‘I – I don’t know.’

  By the time we had weeded about half of Horse Leasow the sun was reddening the backs of our necks and the barrow was heaped high. Together we pushed it back to the yard for Doble to burn, and went inside for something to eat. The men had already had their dinner, but Mother had left bread and cheese and a bowl of hard-boiled eggs on the table under a cloth.

  We ate with the wireless on, and afterwards I carried our plates to the sink while Connie took the leftover food back to the pantry. A few of the bricks were broken in there and I could hear them clinking as her feet moved over them; could tell, in fact, that she had paused to scan our shelves of home-made preserves. I hoped she didn’t linger over the tins of peas and tomato soup and condensed milk, which I could guess she wouldn’t approve of; I tried to imagine Mother’s face if Connie were ever to write anything critical of us in one of her magazines.

  ‘Will you show me upstairs, Edie? I’ve never seen the rest of the house,’ she said, emerging from the pantry as I was drying our plates.

  ‘Haven’t you really? Of course, come up. There’s not much to see, though.’

  ‘Oh, you know me. I like these old houses. There’s something so magical about them.’

  I wondered if she’d say the same in the depths of winter when the kitchen was the only room in the house where you didn’t need to wear woollen gloves, or during a wet autumn when our clothes stank of mildew and storms tore hanks of old thatch from the roof.

  We climbed the steep and creaking stairs, Connie stopping to remark on the wormy, battered oak of the treads smoothed by centuries of feet. She thought them rather lovely – though Mother wanted them replacing. ‘One day one of us’ll put a foot clear through,’ she sometimes said.

  The stairs led directly into the room where Mother and Father slept, and I hastily pulled the counterpane over their disordered bed and pushed the chamber pot out of sight. But Connie made straight for the fireplace, which had over it the traces of a painted pediment, very faded and incomplete where some of the plaster had flaked off to reveal the bricks beneath. I watched as she ran her fingertips over it; it was as though I was suddenly seeing the room, so familiar, so ordinary, through her eyes.

  ‘Early seventeenth century, I’m sure of it!’ she breathed.

  I showed her the beam with an ornate ‘G.M.’ carved into it by my great-great-grandfather, and the rings on the floor of the empty chamber above the old dairy from the great wheels of cheese that had once been stored there. We peeked into Frank’s untidy room with its giddily sloping floor, still with a kite pinned to the wall despite his age; and Mary’s old room with its faded wallpaper, now the place where we kept spare blankets and linen and winter greatcoats, and still where I went to sleep if I was feeling particularly desolate, as I often did on the day or two just before the Curse.

  ‘I suppose being small, with such tiny windows, helps keep the bedrooms warmer – after all, only your parents’ room has a fireplace.’

  ‘Oh, we hardly ever use it. Father says it’s unhealthy to sleep in warm rooms. I expect really it would cost too much in firewood,’ I said.

  In my room she peered out through the little deep-set window, doubtless orientating her position in the house by the yard and horse-pond; and then she set to examining my books, which were set in piles on my writing desk, since the gable end of the house often became damp over winter and I didn’t want them to spoil.

  ‘Swallows and Amazons, yes, and Masefield, and dear old Jefferies, and John Clare. No Williamson . . . You’ve read Tarka, though? Surely you have. Such a brilliant man, and with a lot of good ideas. I met him at a garden party once, raising funds for a political party. Oh, and what about Waugh? Though perhaps you’re a little young – well, I’ll write home for one or two of his, and you can see how you get on.’

  I sat on the bed feeling backward and childish, something I rarely felt around Connie. I was the bookworm of the Mather family, the one real reader in the house, but just then I felt as though I knew nothing about literature at all.

  ‘Do you know a lot of authors, Connie?’

  ‘Oh no, not really. I wouldn’t say I know Mr Williamson, we just had a chin-wag over a couple of gin slings. He probably wouldn’t even remember me. I met Henry Massingham too, once. Such a fine man. It was his articles on rural crafts and home cultivation that helped me to see what my life’s work should be. I told him so at the time.’

  ‘Connie – when are you going back to London?’

  She straightened up and turned around. ‘Well – I’m not sure, darling. Don’t say you’re tired of me already; I’m not ready to return to Tooting just yet. In fact, do you know, I’ve rather grown to like it here. Perhaps I’ll stay, and marry some ruddy-cheeked rural swain.’

  I smiled at that. ‘I’m not tired of you, Connie, of course not. But – could I come and visit, do you think? When you go back?’

  ‘A trip to town? Marvellous idea! Am I to take it you’ve never visited London before?’

  I shook my head. ‘Market Stoundham’s the furthest I’ve ever been.’

  ‘Well, you must, in that case. After the harvest has been safely gathered in, perhaps? You could come on the train.’

  I couldn’t imagine being trusted to make the journey alone, but perhaps she could speak to Mother and persuade her. After all, Mary would doubtless have been allowed to go at my age.

  ‘September can be a marvellous time to come, with the gas lamps lit in the evenings and the leaves on the plane trees turning yellow,’ she continued. ‘I’ll ask Ada, too, shall I? We can make it a ladies’ week-end.’

  She must have seen something cross my face because she laughed then.

  ‘Oh – just you and I, Edie? Yes, whyever not!’

  Our barley was well along now, flaxen from a distance and with the beards tipping over almost as we watched. The wheat, too, was ripening: the stalks were still blue-green, but the tops of the ears were fading to a greenish-yellow, a tint that would become richer and spread down the ears as they fattened to finally gild the stalks and leaves. Then the sound of the cornfields would alter: dry, they would susurrate, whispering to Father and John that it was nearly time. The glory of the farm then, just before harvest: acres of gold like bullion, strewn with the sapphires of cornflowers
and the garnets of corn poppies and watched over from on high by larks.

  But not yet. We still needed more rain, for the land was thirsty from the year before and the streams and field drains were still low. And while we waited for it to ripen, the corn could become knee-sick, fall prey to wireworms, earcockle, stinking smut, take-all or a thousand other plagues. It could be laid low by storms, spoil in the barn or simply fail, times being what they were, to make a good price.

  That evening at supper, Father held forth on the Wheat Act, which, he said, was merely a tariff in disguise, the money to guarantee prices coming from a tax on British flour at the mills. He had been to a Farmers’ Union meeting in Monks Tye that afternoon, and his fettle was up.

  ‘And who’s to say they won’t betray us again as they did before?’ he said as he ate. ‘They walk all over the little man, they allus have.’

  ‘You can’t trust politicians, George. They lie and lie,’ Connie said. She had stayed on to eat with us, although I wasn’t quite sure if she’d been invited or had simply not left. ‘They’ll tell you the sky is green if they think it’ll win them a vote. We should have proper import controls to protect our native English farmers – it’s the only way. There are advertisements in the newspapers now for Argentine beef, brought over in refrigerated ships.’

  I glanced up to see how Father would take her interjection. None but John or Grandfather joined in with talk on farming matters; not Doble, not even Frank yet, and certainly not a woman. If he should reprimand her – well, I didn’t think I could bear it. I felt the blood rush to my cheeks at the thought.

  ‘Happen you’re right, Constance,’ Father said, looking at her speculatively. ‘Wheat’s less than five pound a tonne, yet we’re bringing in flour from Canada now, and barley from Czechoslovakia’s fetching double what ours is, straight off the boat. That can’t be right.’

  John had stopped eating and sat looking at Connie, his bone-handled knife and one of our old tin forks held lightly in his hands.

  ‘They do say import controls would mean ordinary people would pay more in the shops for food, though,’ he said.