by Angela Huth
For as long as he could remember, Ratty’s small patch of garden had been home to a dynasty of blackbirds. Close guardians of their territory, year after year different generations would sing from their inherited place in the lilac tree. They left the cherry tree to the chaffinches.
At the end of February, Ratty heard the first evensong from a couple of old males. Their prime over, he knew that all they would afford him was a run-through of melodies from time past, sung only at dusk, and lacking their former vigour. But this was a sign, too, that a member of the new generation would be shortly taking over. Ratty was keen to catch his first sight of the inheritor.
After a lone breakfast – Edith, for the first time in her life, had taken to staying in bed – Ratty pottered into the garden. There on the grass he found the chap he was looking for: a handsome bird, still the dark brown of its mother, its beak also still brown. The ring round its eye was a pale hint of the gold it would become in the next few weeks.
The bird showed no fear of his presence. Ratty stood quite still, studying it for some moments, then pottered off to the end of the garden past the lilac tree. He turned, leaned against the fence, looked back at his cottage. From the branches of the unpruned tree came the first ripples of familiar song: tentative at first, then swelling in confidence, accelerating among scales, showing off. If Ratty had been a man of sentimental disposition he might have thought the bird had followed him, read his thoughts, sung especially for him. As it was, the music which annually renewed optimism that had been frayed by winter merely reminded him spring was here at last: there was much work to be done. And that this time next year life as he knew it at Hallows Farm would be over. He would be finally retired, not semi-retired like the old blackbirds. God knows, then …
Ratty retraced his steps along the path that struggled to keep its identity through neglected grass. Every yard or so he paused, let the blackbird’s song – riotous, rapturous, now – lock him into a present of nothing but pure sound. The past and the future were both places he had no wish to be.
He contemplated the back of his ramshackle cottage, not a thought in his head. The music of the bird excited the old skin of his arms into roughness beneath his sleeves. Then, it appeared. He saw ahead of him a monster. At first, he thought the horrible creature, standing there at his own back door, must be a hallucination. He had slept little of late, what with the lambing. Several times he had found himself confused, not remembering, seeing things that vanished into air. And yet he knew he was awake. The ground was firm beneath his feet. The blackbird went on singing.
The monster had one large glassy eye, oval-shaped, and the rubbery black snout of a giant pig. It stood on its hind legs, front legs folded, staring back at Ratty, no expression in the terrible eye. Then it took a few steps towards him and Ratty saw its skin – a horrible blue – was a familiar blue skirt, and its forelegs were human arms in the wrinkled sleeves of a brown cardigan.
It was Edith in her gas mask.
‘Dear God, Edith!’ Ratty cried.
So great was his relief that he had to lean on his stick to save himself from tumbling. He felt coldness gushing through the precarious joints of his knees. Sweat greased his temples. His hands shook.
‘You gave me a fright, you did. Whatever are you doing in that thing?’
Edith pulled off the mask. Her face was pale, her eyes unsteady. Sprigs of white hair, normally caught back into a bun, allowed light to pink the skin of her skull.
‘There’s lambs in the fields, bombs in the sky,’ she said quietly.
Ratty glanced up, unsteady. Two clouds moved across a stretch of silent grey-blue.
‘There’s never,’ he said.
‘The war’s come here, now, you mark my words.’
‘I’m going down to the farm.’ Ratty shook his head. He didn’t like the look of her.
‘You take a gas mask, Ratty Tyler, or you’ll regret it.’
‘I’ll never take one of those things.’
Ratty shuffled past her, eyes on the ground, heading for the lane. He was aware that Edith shrugged.
‘We’ll all be dead as cowpats, soon,’ she said.
While Ag did not share Edith’s fear of bombs in the local sky, she became increasingly aware of the war in parts of the world far from their own: fighting in Malta, the Philippines, Hitler’s renewed attacks on Russia, the sufferings of the Eighth Army in Egypt. So long and busy were the days, now, that there was little time to keep up with the daily bulletins, and she rarely saw a newspaper. But Ag made a point of trying to listen to the nine o’clock news every night, with the Lawrences. The acceleration of war, even from this comparatively safe corner of Dorset, unnerved her more than it did the others. When she wasn’t thinking of Desmond she found herself almost obsessively imagining battles, destruction, killing, corpses.
In contrast to – and perhaps because of – these dark reflections, this spring seemed of particular significance. Ag watched its slow beginnings. Mrs Lawrence had long ceased to tend the garden: priorities these days were fruit trees and the vegetable patch. But Ag, knowing her employer’s love of flowers, had bought and planted a few dozen bulbs in November. Now they began to appear, much to Mrs Lawrence’s surprise. First, snowdrops. Then the ‘rathe’ primrose (Ag had never been able to discover the meaning of Milton’s arcane word, she admitted to Joe one evening) in the orchard, where one of her tasks was thoroughly to spray every tree with lime sulphur – protection against apple scab. In beds that edged the neglected lawn, a dozen narcissi straggled through the unkempt earth. By March a few scarlet tulips randomly glittered, cold as glass among the weeds. Mrs Lawrence’s delight was touching.
‘So kind of you, Ag,’ she said. ‘The pity of it is we shan’t be here to see how they’ve spread, next year.’
Rewards for Ag’s autumn labours were beginning to be seen in the hedges, too. She and Mr Lawrence observed buds breaking on the carefully woven young hazel shoots. They found a haze of new leaf on the long, neat thorn hedge that protected two sides of Lower Pasture.
‘Beautiful laying, I’m bound to say,’ Mr Lawrence gently boasted as they inspected the new growth. ‘I think we did a good job, Ag. The new owners, whoever they are, will find themselves with a nicely cared-for parcel of land …’
They walked through the woods. Ag had the impression that the farmer’s eyes were scouring every view with particular vigilance, as if storing sights and sounds for the future. He pointed out a blackcap, high in an ash tree, paused to listen to its wild song. On the far side of the wood they came across a gathering of fieldfares, preparing for their journey overseas. On another occasion, inspecting a newly sown field, they heard the croaking voice of a corn bunting. And one fine afternoon, from out of an almost eerie silence, the intense bubbles of a skylark’s song dropped like a waterfall on the ploughed earth.
‘You see it, you hear it, you feel it, year after year,’ said Mr Lawrence, ‘and it always catches you out, spring, the wonder of it. Makes you think: funny kind of God. On the one hand there’s all this; on the other, thousands of armed men out to destroy each other. And now all this talk of an atom bomb, which could be the end. Doesn’t make sense. Look: first woodpecker of the year, cocky bastard.’ He placed a hand on Ag’s arm to stop her moving. He thought how even now, despite the dimming of the tormenting flames, he would not allow himself to touch Stella in the same innocent way. Their eyes followed a brief flash of emerald feathers. ‘Tell you one thing: if we get through this bloody war, if I eventually come to retire – know what I’d like to do? I’d like to write a book about migration. Something that’s always fascinated me: something no one really understands.’
‘I’d like to read it.’ Ag smiled at him.
‘You shall have a copy inscribed to the best hedging apprentice I ever came across. You’ve a real talent for hedging, Ag: there’s not many have that. You’re pretty smart when it comes to birds, too – not just the dry academic I thought you might be. But then, I was wrong about a
ll of you. I admit that. I was against your coming. It was Faith who insisted. She turned out to be right, of course. You can count on Faith, in most things, to be right. To be wiser than anyone else.’
Mr Lawrence’s approbation meant much to Ag. It cheered her for a while. But the underlying melancholy she suffered that spring never entirely left her. Hope that the end of the war might not be too far off began to fade. As did the possibility of Desmond.
While Ag struggled with the feeling of doom within her, Stella tried to understand why – with no prospect of seeing Philip for some time, and scant letters – she felt so content. Pieces of an incomprehensible puzzle kept appearing. There was the day when Prue sprained her wrist and could not drive the tractor: Joe tried to teach her, without much success, to plough a straight furrow. They laughed so hard at her attempts Stella felt weak and giddy, earth and sky spinning about as she leaned up against one of the great mudguards. There was the day Noble had to be taken to the blacksmith. Joe drew a map of how to get there, a simple route of some five or six miles. But then he suddenly changed his mind about Stella’s ability to find the way despite his directions: declared if she was to return before nightfall he would have to accompany her. She rode the horse bareback, Joe cycled beside her. Somehow, it all took the best part of the day. They had spam sandwiches at the local pub while the shoeing took place, returned by a longer route through high-banked lanes, rhythmic sparky noise of the horse’s hoofs making a bass for the breeze. The pieces of the puzzle all contained Joe.
Looking back much later, Stella could never say when it was exactly that the whole picture fell into place. Unlike Joe, she was not struck by blinding revelation. The building of her own certainty formed so quietly, so subtly, that its culmination was no surprise. What she saw before her – when, when exactly? she could not say – she knew had been there for ever, waiting for a cover to be drawn back. She calmly accepted its existence, knowing there was nothing to be done. She knew Joe liked her, had no idea if he felt more than that. They were both committed to other people. It was likely their friendship would come to an end when they left the farm. There was nothing that could be done. Stella’s love for Joe was fated to die before it could ever live. He would never know about it. All she must do was exercise caution, contain her happiness, give no clue as to the heartbreak of her feelings. It was worthless to reflect upon the cruelty of mistiming. In the short months left to her, Stella decided, all she could do would be to imprint every possible moment in her mind, to feed on, sometimes, in the years to come: for it would surely never be like this again. This was so far removed from the old, frivolous, silly notions she had had in the past of being in love, based on nothing more than wishful thinking, that she laughed herself to scorn, felt suddenly old. This was certain love: the kind that spreads, and grows and, given the chance, can survive. Stella believed – when she allowed herself the luxury of thinking about it – that she had been blessed with, a rare feeling, seldom repeated in a single life. To stifle any acknowledgement of this feeling would be the hardest challenge she had ever known. It would be a kind of murder, something she would live to regret always. But there was no alternative.
Stella did her best to contain herself. By the time the bluebells were coming out in the woods, and the cow parsley, she felt herself well under control. She divided her attentions evenly between everyone, was punctilious in her behaviour. No one, she was sure, could have any idea. All the same – and here was the ghost of a new puzzle – her eyes did inadvertently meet Joe’s more than usual. Somehow, they often found themselves working together. Somehow, their paths often crossed. And all the while, to Stella in her confused happiness, the trumpetings of spring were no more than an abstract background of birdsong and new leaf and clear sky. Nothing in nature, this spring, was sharp-edged. Only Joe’s face was clear. She tried to read in it any sign of something beyond close friendship, but failed. Her position was a solitary one, then: her secret the hardest thing she had ever had to bear.
For Prue, spring was a dizzying experience. It was the first year of her life she had witnessed it outside Manchester, and she found it a revelation.
‘No wonder blood rises,’ she observed, skipping about, marvelling at lush new grass and emerald leaf. Indeed, she found the whole process even more captivating than shopping. Several weeks running she chose not to go into the local town on her half-day, but to gather primroses or snowdrops, to stand gazing at a field of ewes with their lambs, until Mr Lawrence accused her of ‘idling’. Stella and Ag became impatient with her constant wonder. After a while she kept it to herself.
Three things, however, disturbed the magic of the season. First, the Government’s ban on embroidered underclothes and nightwear put Prue in a rage: she had been planning to surprise Robert with some Jean Harlow petticoats she’d seen in a magazine. Now, the shop would be banned from selling them. Second, Sly and her piglets were sold to a nearby piggery. Mr Lawrence took the trouble to apologize to Prue, but explained he had had an offer he could not refuse. He had planned for Sly to go anyhow: sooner was less worrying than later. The screaming, as mother and brood were loaded on to the lorry, was terrible – matched only by Prue’s wailings. She was quiet, puffy-eyed, mascara-smudged for the rest of the day, but insisted on being the one to do the final clearing of the sty.
While the matter of the underwear was ridiculous and the departure of Sly sad, these two things caused only a few days of rampant gloom. The third matter was a constant flickering of discomfort that only sprang into clear life when Prue gave herself time to reflect: Robert.
Robert, she was fast coming to realize, was no match for her own rising sap. For almost four months she had enjoyed his company, his love-making, his dry little jokes. She had given up trying to induce warmth into his flesh, and had become used to his chilly limbs and lips. But the fact was there was no spur to continuing the affair for the rest of the year until Prue left. They were useful to each other, liked each other, but had nowhere to go. And no destination, in the curious love map that lived in Prue’s mind, meant that a relationship could not and would not survive very long. She sometimes faced the fact that, beast that she was, the only real, lasting aphrodisiac for her was money: she could only sustain eternal interest if there was money in the lover’s bank.
But she made no indication of her waning interest: pointless, when there was no one to replace Robert. They weren’t thick in ploughed fields, the kind of men she fancied – or indeed any men at all. So for the time being, wistfully wishing there was a new challenge to be found in the mossy banks in the woods, she stuck to the arrangement of going out with Robert three times a week.
Some days after Sly’s departure, and after the kind of low-key night which Prue found hard to forgive in any man, she was feeling more than usually melancholy despite the glorious spring morning. But at lunch, Mrs Lawrence broke some news which, as Prue saw it, was a once-in-a-lifetime remedy for any kind of tragedy. A letter had arrived from Headquarters of the Land Army in London to say that the King and Queen were to give a tea party, in the summer, for a selection of land girls from all over the country. A limited number of invitations was allocated to each county. Mrs Lawrence was required to send one representative. Prue’s incredulous wail cut the reading of the letter short.
‘Buckingham Palace? I don’t believe it …’
‘Obviously the fairest thing would be to draw lots,’ said Mrs Lawrence. Prue’s moment of dazzling anticipation collapsed.
‘Of course,’ she said, ‘that would be the only fair thing.’
There was a moment’s silence. Stella and Ag glanced at each other, looked at Prue’s face, twisted by a mixture of feelings.
‘I don’t know about Stella,’ said Ag, ‘but I’d be happy not to go. I’ve been to London often and I don’t like it. The outside of Buckingham Palace is good enough for me.’
‘Same here,’ agreed Stella, a moment later. She had no desire for a single afternoon away from Joe.
‘So wh
y doesn’t …?’ Ag waved a hand towards Prue. ‘There doesn’t need to be a vote. I think it’s a unanimous decision.’
‘Are you sure?’ Mrs Lawrence looked anxiously from Ag to Stella.
Both girls nodded. Prue let out another, exalted wail. She ran to hug and kiss each one of them in turn, leaving pink lipstick on their cheeks, and showering them with incoherent thanks for being the most generous, kind, and wonderful friends she had ever known.
Prue needed time to herself, of course, to think about the vital matter of what to wear. That afternoon, a half-day, she wandered off to the woods to marvel at the dog violets and cow parsley and stretches of bluebells, and to find inspiration about what colour and material, and who would make it and where … But, for once, she found difficulty in concentrating on the subject of clothes. Her excitement at the prospect of the far-off date at Buckingham Palace had made her more jittery than she would ever admit to the others. She sat down under a tree, struggled between thoughts of pink or, more original, yellow. She jumped up again, began to wander waist-high among the cow parsley, listening to a crowd of birds doing their nut, bursting their lungs. Restlessness increasing, she began to break off stems of cow parsley with the idea of putting a great jug of the stuff on the kitchen table – beating Ag at her own game – to give Mrs Lawrence the surprise of her life. Then, she came upon an intense patch of bluebells: spreading, they were, as far as she could see, a blue that no paint box on earth can contain, a blue that took her breath away. Prue stood still, marvelling. Then it came to her: artificial silk this very colour. Surely, somewhere, she could find it, if it meant searching half Dorset. Thrilled by her idea, she knelt on the ground, began to pluck fast at the flowers, amazed to find that some of the long stalks slipped easily from the ground, a shining purple-green, untouched by the earth they had come from. She would add these to the jug: they’d all think she’d gone potty, but she didn’t care. She’d defy any of them to disagree with bluebell artificial silk …