‘You mustn’t complain, or break the man’s concentration, or it won’t be a success,’ she explained. ‘One day you’ll understand.’
Mother let me decide between two patterns that day. One had short, puffed sleeves and a sweetheart neckline; the other had a wide collar and ruching just below each shoulder. That was the one I chose. Mrs Eleigh measured out the cloth – a sage-green poplin patterned with sprigs, since I wasn’t allowed to have scarlet – and we settled our account and left, the shop bell tinkling again over our heads. But instead of feeling excited about the new frock I was to have, all I felt was unease.
VIII
It isn’t easy to conceive, when you are growing up, that the world could be any different than how you find it, for the things you first encounter are what normality comes to consist of, and only the passage of time teaches you that your childhood could have been in any way otherwise.
Even so, it was impossible in those years not to know that there was an army of men missing from the fields and farms. Some were our fathers and uncles; many were farm boys or horsemen. We knew them by the empty pews at St Anne’s and the seats untaken at the Bell & Hare; the hay-rakes and scythes leaning unused in the barns; the ricks thatched indifferently for want of skilled men. Although most farmers themselves were excused, the War left gaps in the land and the working of it, and even if you were born in peacetime, as I was, you could feel it everywhere.
Mary, Frank and I would always have had to help in the fields, for the work on a farm is never finished, and can always be done better with extra hands, or finer weather, or more time. But had Tipper and Uncle Harry’s names not been written in gold in the Book of Honour in the church, perhaps our hedgerows would have been better managed, for in those years they began to creep out into the fields. In spring the crops might have been better weeded, and the clods harrowed more thoroughly from the winter clay. The ditches might have been cleared more often and thus kept the lowest-lying fields from becoming stoachy, and all these things might have meant that we had better yields.
One morning Father set Frank and me to hoe and hand-pull Crossways, while he and Mother went to work on Far Piece. It was nearing the end of July and the wheat was golden, the barley ash-blonde; but despite all we’d done earlier in the year, amongst it all grew corn poppies and cornflowers, dockweed, thistles, wild onion, mousetail, cleavers, shepherd’s needle, charlock, rye brome and corn buttercup, and before we could harvest, as many weeds as possible had to be pulled, for too much green in the sheaves would make them heat and spoil in the rick. It was the kind of work I hated: mindless and monotonous, hard on the back and hands, and it went on for days. But there was no sense in complaining: the task had to be done if we were to farm, and there was only us to do it. And so we went.
Crossways was a big field, and oddly shaped. It had once been two fields, both belonging to Hullets; Father had bought them after the War, when I suppose Hullets’ fortunes were first falling – though we none of us knew that yet. He and John had borrowed the Fordson we later bought to grub up a hedge of field maples, making one large field that was easier to work. It proved since then to be some of our best land.
On the third day of weeding Connie joined us, her hair hidden by a red peasant scarf. We laughed at her at first, Frank and I, for not knowing one plant from another, and for her difficulties in keeping her big feet between the narrow rows; yet by the time we stopped work she was keeping pace with us.
‘It’s just an amusement to her, Ed,’ Frank said when at last she left to bicycle home. ‘A day in the fields. It’s something for her to write down and tell city folk about.’
‘I think you’re being unfair on her. She worked hard to-day.’
‘She won’t be back. You mark my words.’
But she was. Connie helped us weed Crossways, and then The Lottens too, and despite her reddening arms and face, despite her height that must have meant she felt each stoop more keenly than I did, she never once complained. She joined in when we sang, too, for we usually sang while working: ‘Green Bushes’, and ‘Come All You Bold Britons’, or perhaps something from the music halls, her clear, warm contralto ringing out over our more artless voices in the warm summer air.
‘How are you enjoying your time in the country, Constance?’ Frank asked her late one afternoon. She had told him time and again to call her Connie, but he wouldn’t; still, at least he no longer addressed her as Miss FitzAllen, as though she was a teacher, I thought.
‘Very well! I feel I get stronger every day, and healthier. London seems like a different world to me now.’
‘Don’t you miss anything about it?’
‘Not a thing, if I’m honest. Drawing-room conversations? Dressing for dinner? Everyone rushing to see the latest avant-garde play straight from the Continent, or opine on some ridiculous modernist art? None of it seems quite real compared to life here.’
‘It’s queer, though – most people here would bite off your hand for the chance to live in the city.’
‘Well, then, they’d be fools. The rich there are boring, the poor for the most part live intolerably, and the intellectual set are degenerates and inverts, to a fault. Sex! Good Lord, they’re obsessed with it – almost as much as they’re obsessed with themselves.’
I laughed to see Frank’s face, for while I was growing used to Connie’s forthrightness, he had turned red as a beet.
‘Oh, Connie, you mustn’t tease him,’ I said. ‘He doesn’t know you yet.’
‘You two are lambs. I apologise for my vulgarity. Here, Frank – shake my hand, won’t you?’ – and a little shyly, but grinning, he did.
‘So you’re writing a book about us?’
‘A series of articles for now. Don’t worry, I shan’t use your names.’
‘Well, you can if you like. I should quite enjoy being famous, I think.’
‘Oh, really! Well, then, perhaps I will: “Introducing Frank Mather, flower of rural youth, model of our native breed.”’
‘You’re teasing me again.’
‘Perhaps I am – but you’re learning to like it, I can tell.’
Father had set one of the village boys to scare pigeons, and from Greenleaze came the sound of a wooden clapper and his faint shout: ‘Oy, oy, oy!’
Frank stooped and cast a big flint underarm to the edge of the field. ‘More stones than corn this year, near enough. You’d think we’d sown gravel.’
I laughed. ‘You can see why farmers used to think the earth grew them. You can clear a field as many times as you like, but still they come up.’
‘What about the ones with the holes through?’ asked Connie. ‘Aren’t they supposed to be good luck?’
‘Adder-stones, they’re called, or hag-stones. John’s the one to tell you all about those.’
‘Oh, now look what I’ve found – !’ and she crouched, and before either of us could warn her not to she scooped up a late clutch of baby larks and held them out to us, struggling, in her hands.
By Saturday, John had finished with Seven Acres and Father had trimmed all our hedges that faced the road, so that laden wagons – our own and our neighbours’ – could pass comfortably through the narrow lanes. We still had some wheat to weed, but the barley was nearly all clear, and while it would all need to be done once more before harvest it felt as though we had achieved something, that we had, by our toil, helped a little to safeguard the crops on which our future depended. And so Mother made beef with boiled potatoes and cabbage and a jam roly-poly, and invited Connie to eat with us again.
I laid the big table in the dining-room, for Mother said she didn’t want Connie casting her beady eye over everything she did in the kitchen, as she had last time. When the family had taken their places Mother and I brought the food through, and then John and Doble filed in and sat down. Father, at the head of the table, began to carve, and when we had all been served I shut my eyes and prepared to say Grace.
‘I should like to hear our guest say Grace to-day, Edith,’
said Father. ‘Constance, would you oblige?’
‘Oh – well, I don’t – I mean I haven’t –’
I glanced up and saw that Connie was actually blushing, unless it was just the effects of four days’ sun.
‘I’m so sorry, George – but I’m an atheist,’ she said.
There was a silence in which I could almost feel the air of the room pressing on my eardrums.
‘Well, I’ll be darned,’ said Father, at length. ‘Happen as I’ll say Grace, then, to-day. But mind you bow your head, Constance FitzAllen. I’ll have no disrespect.’
‘Tell me, Ada,’ said Connie when he’d finished, pouring gravy liberally over her plate, ‘do you know much about the people who’re living at the empty place – Hullets, it’s called, isn’t it?’
‘Oh! Well. We’re – we’re not sure,’ said Mother. ‘Are we, George?’
‘It’s a family, from what I’ve heard,’ Connie continued. ‘They’re not from around here.’
‘Can’t say as we know a great deal about their history, Constance,’ John said.
‘Oh yes, or so Violet – Mrs Eleigh – told me. Ada, this cabbage is delicious. Did you fry it in the beef dripping after it was boiled?’
‘So it’s common knowledge, then – about Hullets?’ Mother asked. ‘We knew there were people there; we saw smoke, so John went over in case someone had fired the thatch. He said they were decent enough – didn’t you, John? – just that they’d fallen on hard times.’
From Frank’s bland expression I could see that none of this was a surprise to him. I wondered when he’d found out, and why he hadn’t told me; when we’d been weeding Crossways, Hullets had been in view nearly the whole time. Yet he’d said nothing at all.
‘Oh yes, everyone knows,’ Connie said. ‘The two Rose boys were the first to mention it, I think. At the Bell & Hare.’
‘I might have known,’ said Mother. ‘Frank, what did I tell you about gossiping?’
‘I didn’t say anything!’ he protested. ‘Rose Farm borders Hullets, too; they probably found out about them themselves, just as we did.’
‘Well, anyway, I’m going to pay them a visit tomorrow morning,’ said Connie.
‘Can I come?’ I said. I still felt the injustice of their trespass, but my sense of curiosity about them was growing keen; and in any case, I just wanted to spend time with Connie. I didn’t really mind what we did.
‘You may not, young lady,’ said Mother. ‘Tomorrow’s Sunday. We’ll be at church.’
‘After church?’
She gave me one of her looks.
‘But why didn’t you want anyone in the village to know about them, Ada?’ asked Connie, helping herself to another potato and passing the dish to John.
‘Ada’s worried that people will be unchristian and move them on,’ said Father. ‘She’s soft-hearted – that’s what it is.’
‘I sense you differ in your opinion, George?’
‘Well, it’s allus been more my view that charity begins at home.’
‘I tend to agree with you,’ said Connie. ‘It’s all terribly unfortunate, but the public assistance bill is already far too high.’
‘Well, it’s out of our hands now,’ said Mother. ‘But if they’re still there tomorrow, do take them over something from the kitchen here, Connie. Whoever they are, I’ll not see a family starve.’
‘What are your politics, Constance, if you don’t mind me asking?’ John said, addressing himself to his plate.
‘Well, I’m not a supporter of the Labour Party or the Conservatives these days, if that’s what you mean. I gave Socialism a chance after the War, but since Labour failed I’ve rather abandoned the party system. I believe that this country requires a far more . . . wholesale change.’
‘Do you mean to say that you are neither for the Right nor the Left?’
‘They’re indivisible, to my mind. Progress is impossible without stability, and stability is impossible without progress. That’s what I believe.’
That sounded like good sense, I thought, reaching for a second helping of beef, but Father stopped me with a warning glance. ‘That girl will eat us out of house and home before long,’ he sometimes grumbled to Mother, so that I would hear.
John continued: ‘And what is the great change that our country requires, would you say?’
‘Well, we’re living through a depression that isn’t of our own making,’ she said, her voice suddenly practised, rather than spontaneous. ‘We need a strong government to free us from our dependence on the international finance system – one which will act in the best interests of the British people, that will favour British manufacturing and farming, and ensure this never happens again. We need a British system of credit that benefits Britain alone, rather than lining the pockets of usurers and profiteers – and that means proper import quotas, and reform of our agricultural system. We must bring down national debt and return to full employment, of course; and we must look to the shires and their ancient traditions, not to the intellectual classes in the cities, for a new sense of national identity and pride. Places like here,’ she said, smiling at all of us and sitting back, her little speech over.
‘Hear, hear,’ Father said.
‘A strong government, you say? I’ll wager I can guess who it is that you mean,’ said John.
‘The silly little fencing-master?’ she laughed. ‘Good Lord, no, you’re quite wrong on that account.’
‘And where do you see your place in all this?’
It was unlike John to ask so many questions, but Connie seemed to take it in good part. Yet despite her smiles and John’s mild tone, something crackled invisibly in the stale air of the dining-room, and I could feel it. I wondered who on earth the fencing-master was.
‘Well,’ she said modestly, ‘for now my aim is simply to be an observer, to set down the life of the countryside as I find it. It is for others to decide what course the country should take.’
‘And yet you told me you were a Suffragette,’ said Mother, quietly.
‘Only in a very minor way – I didn’t smash any windows or anything. I was just a little too young, more’s the pity.’
John sat back, surprised; I looked at Frank, whose fork hung motionless half-way to his open mouth. I knew all about the brave Suffragettes, of course; Miss Carter had taught us about them at school. And Connie had been one – our very own Connie! I felt my admiration for her grow.
‘Did you cast a vote last time, Ada?’ Connie asked.
‘I – I did.’
‘Quite right. Every woman must,’ she said, and smiled warmly. ‘Don’t worry, I shan’t ask you which way.’
The air in the dining-room seemed to have become very still, although Connie seemed not to notice it. Doble, too, ate on stolidly, quite his usual self.
‘Now, look you here, Constance,’ said my father, wiping the last bit of gravy from his plate with some bread; ‘I thank you for your help this week, but I must tell you that those views are not welcome here, and I won’t have you talking like that again in this house. If Ada votes next time, it will be as I decide.’
IX
The first hymn at Sunday service was ‘O God of Earth and Altar’, one of my favourites, and that day I sang it with great vigour as though to make up for Connie’s apostasy – or perhaps to bolster my own stolid, if rather unimaginative, faith. For I knew at the back of my mind that I was in some way susceptible to her; who could say whether she might already be having an effect?
Mother and Father hadn’t seemed altogether shocked by her being an atheist, but I kept worrying away at it. To my mind only heathens didn’t believe in God and heaven and the Devil and so forth – and only then because they hadn’t yet heard the Good News. But Connie was not only English, she was the daughter of a minister; how could she just decide not to be a Christian any more?
The curious thing, too, was the fact that she had been to church at St Anne’s on more than one occasion – I clearly remembered seeing her in a ne
arby pew in a skirt and sensible hat. Surely her hypocrisy put her at risk of even further damnation, if such a thing were possible.
The sermon that day was on the theme of Empire – the rector had a son in the Colonial Office, something he was very proud of – but try as I might I struggled to prevent my mind from wandering. Connie was nowhere to be seen; was she even at this moment at Hullets, meeting the family Mother said had fallen on hard times? What were they like?
‘For just as we administer our colonies for their own benefit, so God, a kind father, lovingly corrects and punishes His flock,’ the Reverend Woodgate intoned. ‘For as the heathens have flowed unto us, and swelled our Empire, our own people still stream out into all lands. The effects of this are open to the dim guesses of all, while it baffles the most far-seeing calculation to determine what they will be. For our days are cast amidst events of great magnitude and a new import. Never was an Empire so extended as Britain’s; never has a race been entrusted with such a mission as ours, the last to which, it may be surmised, the subjugation of the material world and the enlightenment of our subjects is committed; for it is our burden to educate, and our privilege to achieve the final destiny of Christ’s kingdom on earth.’
Beside me Frank was fidgeting with his collar, which was too high and too tight. On the other side of him, Mother gazed impassively ahead; there had been hard words between her and Father after Connie had left the previous night. I’d come down in the morning to find that breakfast had not been laid out, and when I asked why Mother was still abed, Father snapped at me to ‘leave her be’. At last she’d come down, dressed, when Meg was in harness, but I saw a bright mark on her cheekbone that had not been there before.
I don’t think he was a wicked man, my father. Mother must have seen the good in him to have married him, and although he became more and more locked away from us by the secrets he kept through the years of my girlhood, he and I had once been close – and I never stopped believing that if I could only do or say the right thing, that closeness would one day return.
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