by Melvyn Bragg
‘But . . . ?’
She acted glum. Her expression was and was meant to be comical.
‘He makes me feel I have to be good,’ she said, and caught his eye and smiled.
She was still there! She could be reached.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Grace had never felt so free. The bicycle sped down the long, shallow hill, her coat flowing like a cloak, the summer dawn not long broken. She heard all about her what seemed to her to be a round of applause, in the hedges, in the fields and the trees, as strengthening light brought the awakening of freedom and the noise of greetings. She had the phrase in her head ‘and the birds of the air and everything that crawled on the face of the earth’ and she was at the heart of it. The village she had left behind her was stirring into labour, the horses being fed, the breakfast cooked.
But it was behind her! She was leaving it. Down she swept on the sturdily reconstituted boneshaker, pedalling hard even though there was no need, urging it on, urging herself on in this new freedom towards this new life. Life was so strong in her it could not be contained, and her body ached with it. Suddenly she shouted, then sang, loud as she could, sounds of soprano happiness, pealing across the fields, part of the waking strains of the early-morning land.
The house was no more than three miles away and once she had turned off the main road to Wigton, she found herself in narrow lanes, tunnels of trees, bulging summer hedges, flower-thickened banks, no soul stirring, no sound save for the clamour of the birds. It was like a secret passage that would suddenly reveal a great wonder, and it did.
There it stood, bold and isolated, on its own hillock as if the one were made for the other, Prospects. It was the Victorian folly of a manufacturer, Mr Birkett, who had made his fortune by industrialising the local weaving trade. In his retirement he had developed a passion for the Lake District and its many ever-changing ‘prospects’, the word used, he was informed, by all the best observers, for a view of nature. It was too much of a risk, too far from his business to move into the Lake District itself, but he had bought these two hundred acres of land, which included a classical late eighteenth-century Cumbrian farm on a hillock near Wigton. This was demolished and Prospects was raised up in brick and multi-gabled ambition and its prospects were satisfyingly magnificent.
It glared across the flat country to the south and on into the fells, which could be seen in intrusive close-up, thanks to a large telescope he had bought in London. An unexpected bonus to Mr Birkett was that the prospects to the north, across the sea to Scotland, were just as beguiling for some of his guests.
His granddaughter, Miss Birkett, sister of the Miss Birkett of Oulton Hall, had maintained the daunting pile – there were twenty bedrooms – for more than thirty years. She was not at all displeased to move into Oulton Hall with her younger sister and lease Prospects to the government for the convalescence of the war wounded. But she wanted to play some part in it and made that clear. One of her tasks was to recruit a good number of local women, whom she called ‘my girls’. There was work to be done that mirrored what had happened in the house in its heyday: fires to be laid and lit in the mornings; heavily carpeted rooms to be kept clean – even more essential now; the demands of the staff obeyed; the meals prepared and served. The routine that serviced the stately and the aspiring stately homes of England was largely maintained.
A hospital was bolted on. The stables were converted into operating theatres. The large drawing room was requisitioned as the principal ward. The servants were nudged out of their better quarters to make way for the qualified nurses. The issue of accommodation for staff threatened the whole project in the initial weeks. This was where Miss Birkett, spare and crisp as any military man, came into her own.
She suggested – insisted, rather, Miss Birkett always got her own way – that the general ‘help’ should be provided by ‘girls’ from nearby who could go home in the evenings and sleep there. That would save on accommodation. It would require a ‘shift’ system and it would mean that there had to be flexibility but Miss Birkett said that she was perfectly capable of working that out provided they left her alone.
She issued a call. Her sister helped, as did her long-time neighbour and admirer Major Eliot (Retd). Grace heard the call and was wild for it and determined to get a place. Now that Betty was there to help Sarah and the farm much reduced, she could leave at six thirty having done some chores and, due to the shift system of Miss Birkett, work from seven until four, which gave her time to get back to the farm to help clear up. Saturday hours were easier, seven until one.
Miss Birkett knew her troops. She knew and admired these strong, hardworking, generally godly, honest country girls, especially those off the farms. When the male company was a little ripe, Miss Birkett would humour them and say ‘my girls know all about dealing with very demanding animals’. They were, she said, precisely what was needed and the fact that in order to accommodate their domestic imperatives the roster was impenetrable to all but Miss Birkett was neither here nor there. Miss Birkett could read the runes. It worked. Grace withdrew some of the savings Wilson had held for her and bought the boneshaker, which Frank fettled up. He even gave it a lick of new paint.
So she arrived, she thought, in high style every morning at Prospects, exhilarated by the air, slightly out of breath and, at last, part of the Great World.
They came to Prospects for the second stage of injury – when the major operations had been done – or for the slighter wounds. To Grace, who had never before been in a hospital, it took some time to adjust. The main thing was not to let Miss Birkett know that she ever felt queasy or helpless or nervous. ‘Steady under fire’ was Miss Birkett’s motto.
Although her tasks were menial she was allocated a uniform, stout black shoes, black stockings, black skirt well below the knee, white blouse, one of three to be rotated so that a clean one would be worn every day. In winter there was a dark grey cardigan and at all times a white cap to tuck in hair. In the strictest privacy of her mind, Grace loved the uniform and, worse, she loved herself in it. She was serving a cause. However far she was down the ranks did not matter. The uniform was constant proof that she now had a part.
The smells could make her nauseous until her stomach found its sick legs. The suffering of some of the men and the terrible damage done to them was a drain on her affectionate heart but Miss Birkett had told them ‘It does the men no good for you to be weeping willows.’ She said, ‘Your duty is to be cheerful at all times.’ Worst were the groans and the screams. Yet the men tried to be so brave, even here where, often, it was their bravery that had brought them. They were, Grace thought, entitled to let go while they tried to mend. In the first weeks she was in a daze of admiration for every single one of them. And, mostly, just ordinary young lads, she would tell Wilson, who sat waiting every evening to hear Grace’s report of her day.
There was so much for Grace to do and to learn that she thought her life could just be beginning. All the girls were from around the villages – most of whom she had never seen before. Now she had about a dozen new friends. They had much in common and yet each one was different from the next; it was perfect, Grace thought, a factory must be like this. Then, and overwhelmingly, there were the men, and the intricate range of responses between those wounded soldiers and the girls. The men liked to mock and imitate the broad accents, the local twang. The girls enjoyed that: it made them feel like a special corps and, besides, though it could be broad, their speech was plain and much more comprehensible, Miss Birkett said, than that of a Cockney or a Brummie or a Geordie. The minister, who came weekly, had told Miss Birkett that the girls spoke ‘Old English’. By now he had abandoned any reference to the cousinship of the Germans but Miss Birkett took a fancy to ‘Old English’ and praised her girls for it.
There were the loving moments: the emotional letters that some of the men wanted to share; life stories they could not bear to keep to themselves, as if the destruction of the body had sharpened the need t
o feel that once they had had a life just as full as anyone else’s.
At first the intensity of these encounters, the variety and the number of them, the unhappiness, the terrible stories of the war, and yet the jokes that some men could make, often near exhausted Grace. And yet, she asked herself, as she pushed the pedals to take the bicycle up the final hill back home and into Oulton, how could she be tired? She had no right. Soon she got into the routine and she went from job to job like a bee collecting pollen, never more than a beat away from a sense of satisfaction. But even so she had to get off the bicycle and push it up the last slope of the hill into Oulton. Her new world spun dizzyingly on its axis.
By the following spring, Grace was thoroughly easy in the job. Most of the girls had a ‘favourite’ or two, although it was strictly forbidden. Some thought they were in love and secret messages were exchanged. Had Miss Birkett found out, the girl would have been put on probation and the man given a talking-to by a superior officer. But nothing could stop it and the girls could be very sly.
As spring overcame winter and the great trees on the estate began to bud, then move into heavy leaf, as the hedges regained their dense hiding places and the northern sun coaxed the first flowers into the garden and into the woods, the atmosphere shuddered with intimations of sex. Like Grace, all the girls were now at ease with their work and with the men. The schoolroom anxieties of the early months had dissolved. What they did was too important for that. They were valued, in many cases as never before, and valued publicly for helping the men to health and to fitness to go back into another battle. They began to release their sexuality in little asides and teases, between themselves at first, and then with the men, quietly, carefully, but a cat’s cradle of sensuality was being made.
The men were often in a spasm of longing as the restless young women whispered about them, lowering their eyes coquettishly, pulling the white blouse tight, stroking the blanket very slowly. And then they would giggle among each other and flirt away, only to come back, a little nearer, play again, a little closer. Grace enjoyed these games, and the connection between what she was doing in Prospects and her unofficial engagement to Frank was not consciously made. They were different worlds, weren’t they? There was no harm in it.
But as that spring ripened so did the desire between some of the young men and women. A hand would be caught and kissed, a breast pressed, a suggestion made that was unacceptable and rude and entirely out of bounds. It was as if Prospects had been invaded by a swarm of invisible insects full of juice and fervour, beating their wings around the faces of the flustered girls and the trapped and bedded bodies of the young men, sensing that in some cases their wounds were a source of attraction. The senior staff noticed it but could not prevent it: they, too, felt brushed by the gathering fever.
Sudden laughter would come from a distant bedroom, then silence. The girls began to give each other ‘dares’, some of them very hard for the sex-starved men to bear. They teased the men. There was an innocence about it, a low lean over the bed with an inadequately buttoned blouse, a fierce kiss and a promise. It began to gather a momentum of its own.
As summer came in and the windows were thrown open, and tents were pegged in the grounds as sleeping quarters for those men who were nearing the end of their stay, there were inflammatory rumours, whispered confidences, a maddening current that seized the mood of the days. It became stifling. Its intensity was unbearable.
This one is ‘mine’, a girl would say.
‘She’s for me,’ a soldier would confide.
‘I’ll have that one.’
‘That one.’
‘That one.’
Grace, for a few months now, had been drawn closer to Alan. In the summer it came to the stage where she could not pass his bed without blushing. He looked out for her, and a morning without a greeting was a disappointment. She tried and succeeded in getting the job of cleaning his room – one of the bedrooms in which there were only three beds. These rooms on the second floor were the last staging post for those set to leave in a month or two. The other men there were able to get up, walk down the corridors and the stairs, make their way into the garden and leave the room to Alan and Grace. A sexual surge burst into the room when they were alone together.
She was paralysed with contradictions . . . It was wrong, this friendship, even though nothing yet had happened. But she wanted more to happen and so did he. She had told him about Frank. She had praised Frank to the skies and Alan had nodded understandingly, endorsing her high opinion of her suitor. She would talk too much – he liked to hear about the farm. He, she thought, talked too little. Yet she discovered all she needed to know, she thought.
He came from the Midlands and his father was employed in an engineering works. He showed her a photograph of his father and mother, in front of a bungalow. Another photo, of a young woman, was his sister, he said, older than he was and working as a clerk in a factory. He had joined up at seventeen, been sent to the Front a year later and had his leg badly shot up in an unsuccessful advance. There had also been some small shards of shrapnel in his head.
This information came crisp and early on and he was disinclined to dwell on it. Grace would have enjoyed more talk about the family but she saw that he was not interested. He was more interested in her life and, it seemed to Grace, he romanticised it too much.
They had read some of the same books and this, to Grace, was yet another ascent in her life. He liked to talk about them and he took her opinions seriously. Mr Walker had done that, but Alan was more personal about it, she thought, and certainly more flattering, which she rather distrusted. Most of all Alan loved poetry. ‘There was this teacher,’ he said, ‘who made us read poetry aloud and . . . I took to it . . .’ And Grace seemed to sink ever deeper into a new life.
Mr Walker, who visited Prospects regularly, saw what was happening and knew that he ought to have warned her but she was free now, released from their past. Grace met him as an old friend, a former mentor. He feared for her but her new happiness was an armour that would deflect all criticism. He prayed, though he suspected it was hopeless.
Grace came to like everything about Alan and then to love everything about him. His voice was soft and melodious, unlike any she had ever known in a man. His face was pale but sharply defined, the lips rich and strong, the eyes deeply brown, calf’s eyes, she called them. He was quite tall, despite the slight stoop occasioned by the wound, and he was slim in a way she had not known that men could be slim. Just looking at him, elegant, the stick more fashionable than surgical, an open-necked shirt, a cravat, ‘imitating my elders and betters: strictly “other ranks” myself,’ – he enchanted her. Even the elegant way he smoked a cigarette was a pleasure to watch.
He captured her through the poetry. The lines ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’, ‘My love is like a red, red rose’, ‘She walks in beauty like the night’ – these were like stairways to heaven for Grace. She trusted him completely. It was in her nature to trust and his words, as he knew, sealed it. It had never in her life occurred to her that such words would be directed at her, and although she blushed and pushed him away and told him to hush, yet he persisted. His earnestness seemed proof of his sincerity. And what if he did indeed think of her in those terms? She was unbalanced by it yet in her new self she felt supported, by him, by the concentrated care he gave to her. The love – it took her an effort to say that word – that he had for her was so deep.
It was when, almost in a casual way, he said, ‘When we are married,’ that any doubts she had dissolved. She knew that no one could mention marriage without having given it the greatest thought. He had not yet asked her but by that casual aside he had as good as asked her and she felt herself float up to meet him in some finer place. What their life would be, where it would be, what they would do she neither knew nor cared. All the cautions of her country education were swept away by this boldness, this foreignness, this life of words and love that firmed her body and seized her
mind. She avoided him for a couple of days to attempt to collect herself, which she did.
She came back to see him with questions and reservations but they were crushed by the poignancy of his desperation. Had she deserted him? Had she thought better of it? Why had she left him? In these cries she heard the sound of a role for herself. He was not omnipotent: she had power too. He needed her to live. That was what he said. And she believed him. But her belief was not an abject thing: it gave her strength, it gave her an equality.
The meetings in his room and the few legitimate short outings in the grounds soon became restrictive. They took risks. The risks added to the excitement. They began to fumble each other, and it was then that Grace made the decisive move to tell Frank that it was over between them.
They went for a walk down a familiar lane. She thought it would help but the exchange was no less difficult and unhappy for that. It was Grace who began. Frank’s silence had never been as crushing: she thought she might wilt. She apologised. She said that she had loved him very much but it had come to an end. She took a deep breath and said that she had met someone else – at Prospects. Was she sure? he asked. Yes, she said. She had thought about nothing else for weeks. I knew there was something, he said. He looked at her full on and she needed all her courage. I wish you wouldn’t go, Grace, he said, I really wish you wouldn’t go. And she wavered, as that shaft of directness, that incomparable honesty, shot into her. You’re a good man, Frank, she said. She was sorry. He would find somebody else. There were a lot of girls and one of them would be very lucky to get him. But it’s you I want, Grace, he said, it’s only ever been you. I thought we both felt the same way. She felt, and she was right, that there was something broken in his tone, in his bearing, maybe even in his heart. She had not realised that he loved her so much. He looked forlorn. He looked sad as she had never seen him. But she managed to hold firm.