by Betty Burton
And every year there would be a celebration on the anniversary of A Woman Day. The only thing was, you couldn’t picture Mr Tripp calling forward new women.
She picked up her slate to write “woman”. The “w” she knew, but the next was a puzzle. Mr Warren had shown her which were vowels, but there did not seem to be one to fit “woman”. She put the slate aside. Her mother had said, “You don’t have to dwell on it Jude. Just go on the same.” But Jude liked to think about it. It was the most important thing that had ever happened to her. Even her lessons were not as important. “You’ll get used to it,” her mother had said, and perhaps she would. But she was not used to it yet.
Bella had shown her how to use the cloths and tapes, speaking in a low voice. They were alone in the house, mother and daughter, yet mother had spoken as though the miracle that made the daughter become a woman held the stigma of a shameful disease.
“You don’t have to go telling anybody mind, Jude. Don’t never get caught out. You a get used to it in time, you a get to know.”
And Bella had given her twenty-eight beans to be transferred, one each morning, until she got used to it – so that the new woman would not get caught out.
Jude stayed on the hill longer than she had intended. When she wandered back home, Bella was taking it easy on the porch.
“I’m sorry I was gone so long.”
“I’d a thought you’d a been a bit more careful going off like that – until you’re more used to it.”
Jude was a woman, and revelled in it.
Quite soon the hay turned and they were busy from the early dawn to the late dusk. The weather stayed steady for weeks. Jude became twelve, and when they went to Blackbrook that week, Bella gave Jude an empty book of plain paper in which she wrote, with Fred Warren’s help, “This book was given to Judeth Nugent by Bella Nugent. June 1780.”
When Jude showed her and read it out, Bella nodded and looked pleased.
“You ought to have wrote ‘Isabell’, though.”
“I never knew that was your name, Mother.”
“I shouldn’t wonder that there’s a lot you don’t know yet, Jude, nor never won’t.”
“I hope not. I want to find out everything there is.”
Fred Warren was quite overwhelmed at the speed at which Jude absorbed his instruction, to say nothing of her intuition and intelligence.
“That is really quite good, Judeth,” was about all he would say by way of a compliment on her work. He was afraid that she would somehow be spoilt if, as he would have liked, he said, “That is an astounding week’s work!”
On the Sunday when she was twelve, he gave her a brass-handled magnifying-glass that had been his father’s.
One moment Jude had been there in the church porch, the next she had vanished from Jaen’s sight. Jaen felt a moment of panic. She had been abandoned, left to the Hazelhursts, who had turned out in force as they always did when there was a family event occasioning eating or drinking and preferably both.
The Hazelhursts always appeared to be in greater numbers than they actually were. They were a family famous for “heighth and breadth” and, even though the men always appeared to favour very small women for wives, the Hazelhurst heighth and breadth came out generation after generation, particularly in its men. “Big as Ben Hazelhurst” and “A voice like a Hazelhurst” were local standards.
Dan, at five feet eleven and twelve stones in weight, was a slip of a lad amongst his older brothers. When, at the church door, Dan said to Jaen, “Come on then, Mrs Hazelhurst,” a roar went up from the family and Jude slipped away.
Jaen, at not yet eighteen, was the pretty one. Her hair, although Estover red, was not as wild and frizzed as Jude’s, but soft and easier to control. Winds did not whip up her cheeks to redness like Jude’s and her hands, though weather-worn, sinewy and strong from farm and dairy work, were as elegant in shape as Jude’s were practical. She had an open look, a kind of wide-eyed innocence that made it seem inevitable that, if it had not been Dan Hazelhurst, it would have been some other hearty young man would want to prove his masculinity and dominance. Jaen was a doe that made young stags want to clash antlers: to take, to possess, to own.
All the Hazelhurst men had married small women, so that when they all got settled in the back room of the Dragon and Fount for a wedding breakfast, Jaen stood eye to eye with Dan’s mother and her sisters-in-law, and eye to mid-chest with the menfolk. Bella, in a new skirt and wearing gloves for the occasion, stood with the men talking market prices and good seasons.
At eleven o’clock, the assembly broke up. As Jaen kissed her mother she said, close to her ear, “Ju will be all right, won’t she?”
“Don’t you worry about Jude. By tomorrow she’ll be kicking herself she didn’t have none of this.” Bella indicated the remnants of the celebrations.
“I should have told her what happened straight away. She was very cut up about it; we never had no secrets from each other before. Poor little Ju, I hurt her bad not telling her.”
Bella, panicking at the possibility of her emotions coming to the surface, resorted as always to a straight back and a stern voice.
“You got enough on your plate now. You have to leave Jude to sort herself out. There an’t nothing you can do.”
Jaen, knowing her mother’s dread of anybody making a show of theirselves, smiled cheerfully and said, “She’ll like the baby.”
“Ah, she’ll be like a mother hen, you’ll see.”
Bella did not look at Jaen’s eyes, but concentrated on her own mouth, which she was trying to shape like a smile. Her panic subsided, she was safe from her dreadful, soft emotions. She waved gaily as Jaen mounted the wagon with her boisterous new family.
For the few miles’ drive to the other side of the Tradden and Marl hills, the Hazelhursts kept up an exchange of banter and good-natured argument. They talked about Parliament as though there was a Hazelhurst seat there. Most of what they said was above Jaen’s head, but one thing obvious was that they were a family full of themselves, with a poor opinion of anyone who held different beliefs from their own.
They got down from the wagon a few at a time; sometimes still disputing, raising their voices ever louder to make a point as the wagon drove away. For the last quarter-mile only Jaen, Dan and his mother and father were left.
Nance Hazelhurst nodded forty-winks and old Baxter clicked his tongue at the horses and jiggled the reins, for want of something better to do now that there was no chance of an argument left. Dan sat upright in an unexpectedly stiff neck-cloth.
Jaen still had the feel of Bella’s brushing kiss on her cheek. It had flustered her with its unexpectedness. Her mother had felt soft and warm. So many years had passed since they had touched, except accidentally whilst working, that Jaen had grown up imagining that her mother’s cheek would feel like a ham or a flitch. Instead it had felt like warm, risen dough.
Suddenly, panic rose.
It had been something like that that had started it all. The unexpected warmth of the palm of Dan’s hand on her face that had landed her here. The months between then and now – the time she had no choice but to tell Bella, the meeting with Dan’s parents to see what was to be done, the eventual arrangements – seemed almost unreal, as though it was something somebody told her about, a dream from which she was awakening. She shivered.
“Don’t worry,” said Dan. “We shall be all right when we gets going on our own.”
And with those few words of assurance, Jaen started her life as a Hazelhurst wife.
The Hazelhurst’s place, Up Teg, was much more of a farm than the Nugent holding and the house was bigger. There was a separate cooking fire in a room off the living place, a pump close to the house and a large upper floor that was sectioned off into several rooms, with tarred timbers and wattle and daub partitions which had been smoothed and whitened. Outside there were barns with napped-flint walls and good roofs. Jaen had come up in the world.
Nance Hazelhurst was a bustl
ing woman used to ordering about Baxter and The Boys; six sons, all with a great amount of heighth and breadth. Nance Hazelhurst knew that although they kept bringing these swollen-bellied wives into the family, there wasn’t really any of them that was good enough for The Boys.
All The Boys had got away with it for a time, but eventually there was always some girl, some determined mother like Bella Nugent, who forced a wife upon them. And perhaps it was as well for Dan to get settled down; he did seem to go a bit wild over girls.
Baxter used to say, “If you puts a young bull in a field with heifers, they a bound to get a hoof round the ear’ole if they plays’n up.” But really, Dan had been in one too many bits of trouble, and now he might settle down and leave the maids alone.
She was good-natured, disorganized and not house-proud, which was just as well, for at times there were ten or more pairs of muck-heavy boots tramping in and out.
“I’ve put your bits and pieces in the Yard Room up above,” she told Jaen. “You’ll be all right in there till you’ve birthen, then you can go down yonder when the boys have put down the new thatch.”
She was no less outwardly tough than Bella, but she did, on family occasions when there was wine about, become a bit sentimental. In the Yard Room she put her arms about Jaen.
“They’re all right if you handle them right. There isn’t a lot of harm in them, not really. They got a lot of energy, being so big and all that. As long as you’m a good wife, you a be all right. The Hazelhursts have never gone short of much; even when times is hard they always seem to do all right. There’s always that to think of.”
Four months after coming into the Yard Room Jaen – much to the Hazelhursts’ surprise because she was such a slip of a thing – easily, quickly, getting it over with no fuss, gave Hanna a push into Nance’s waiting hands. Nance, eyeing the neat child covered with faintly-red down, said, “Only her mouth is Hazelhurst.”
By the time Bella and Jude received the message about Jaen’s confinement, the child was well on the way. Bella quickly organised work with the yard-men, then she and Jude rode over to Up Teg.
Nance greeted them at the door with, “She’m one of yours, a red one, won’t hardly make five foot nothing fully grown.”
Bella and Jude did not let her see that they were pleased that Jaen had not had the Hazelhurst heighth and breadth fathered upon her.
Jaen allowed herself to be petted, admired and fussed about, and listened seriously to Bella’s advice. Suddenly she had become initiated and accepted as one who had the full knowledge of womanhood. Jude was left to consider what it felt like to be Aunt Jude and to marvel at the baby. During a pause in the exchange of confinement experience, Jaen and Bella’s gaze fell upon Jude. Together they let out a scandalised, “Jude!” – not loud, because Nance Hazelhurst was below.
Jude had uncovered the child’s hands and was absorbed in examining them through her magnifying glass.
She jumped guiltily, and hastily put the glass back into her pocket. “I’m not doing anything. I just wanted to see.”
“For goodness’ sake put that thing away.”
“I have, I have.” Jude responded to the obvious, patting her pocket.
“What would the Hazelhursts say if they came in now?” Bella swaddled the baby’s hands, as though Jude had left some invisible evidence of her strange behaviour.
“There’s only Missis and she’s in the yard. I can see her.”
“It’s all right,” said Jaen, picking up the baby and looking at its hands herself. “What were you looking for, Ju?”
“Take no notice,” Bella interjected. “You know Jude, she just don’t know where to draw the line.”
“It don’t hurt anything, Jaen, just to look. This is the first chance I’ve had to see human skin that’s unused. I’ve watched rose-buds open. You should see . . .”
“Jude!” Bella took her “I’ve just about had enough” stance.
Reasonably, Jude went on. “Before Jaen left home, she would a wanted to look too. There are tiny creases you can’t see with your eyes.” She capitulated before Bella’s gaze and sat humbly on a hard stool.
Apart from Dan and being Mrs Hazelhurst and now the baby, Jaen should still be the same as she had been for the eighteen years she had been a Nugent, Jude reasoned. Jaen had always been interesting and interested. Jaen was the one who had ideas, thought up good guessing games, climbed trees to throw down conkers and who, even when quite grown up, would say, “Dare you!” or swim naked in Chard Lepe Pond on warm nights, even when Mother had forbid them to go near. Mother never knew about the secrets of Chard Lepe. They were doing something forbidden without really knowing why.
And now Jaen wasn’t the same any more.
Jaen watched Jude. She was growing up, growing up, and they were growing apart. And for what? It was all such a mess. So awful and miserable. She longed achingly for home, Tradden, for her mother’s wet, bright-red tiles. She missed the order, the regularity, the stability. Mother was always a bit of a Tartar, but there wasn’t nothing degrading about being told what to do by her. Not like Dan.
When Mother told you to do something, she’d say, “An’t it about time you got that there pig fed?” But now it was, “Here!” and a bucket of swill was shoved at you. And he was so rough. She hadn’t thought he was rough when she met him, but now . . .
That time when she first went with him, he said he’d never met a girl so carefree and lively; then when she behaved the same after they were married, he said that wasn’t no way for a married woman to behave. Then when they was in the bedroom, he’d get on to her saying, “You wasn’t like this that time in Rathley; you was just trying to catch me.”
Dear Lord, nobody had to try hard with the Hazelhurst boys.
Jaen wished she could run home and take her lessons with her. She wouldn’t a got caught a second time. And she would look after Ju, see she didn’t get herself into that kind of trouble.
You’d a thought anybody would love their baby more than their sister; but I don’t. I’d change it for Ju.
“Hold baby, Jude. Whisper in her ear, like I used to in yours.”
Jude took the baby peace-offering and Jaen asked, wanting to understand, “What were you looking for, Jude?”
“Not anything, really. Just looking . . . to see. You never know what will be there when it gets magnified. If you ever saw a bit of cheese . . .”
“Jude!” Bella warned, and Nance Hazelhurst came into the room.
“Well then, Judeth, it won’t be long before it’s your turn. You got better hips than Jaen there.”
Bella stepped forward as though to protect Jude.
“Plenty of time yet.”
“Get it over when you’re young and got your health and strength is what I always reckon.”
Bella was quiet on their drive home. Jude, knowing her mother’s moods, made no attempt to talk. Bella was not so much angry with Jude as nonplussed at the feeling that Jude was getting a sight too difficult to handle.
She was quite proud of Jude, the way she had learned to write. Fred Warren always came to see Bella at Blackbrook market to give progress reports on his pupil’s extraordinary learning ability. “Like rain on a parched field,” he would say, “soaks up everything. She’s thirsty for knowledge, Mrs Nugent, thirsty.”
At first Bella was unimpressed. Interested, it is true, as she watched, teeth on edge, while Jude scraped letters on to her slate. “That says ‘Isabell Nugent’, and this is ‘Judeth’. Mr Warren showed me how to look it up. Mother, did you know that everybody is written up in a book in their church? Mr Warren says that my name and Jaen’s is not spelled in the usual way. He says the Parish Clerk was bad at his letters and half the village has their names put in wrong.”
“It’s not against the Law? I can’t see that it is. Jaen got married. I only hope they got it right on her marriage lines.”
“Mr Warren says . . .”
“Mr Warren says, Mr Warren says . . .”
&nb
sp; “Well Mother, he does know a lot.”
When Fred Warren had taken Jude to show her the Parish records, it was as a practical primary lesson in history.
“When you start reading properly, Judeth, you will discover that all the books are concerned with kings and barons and battles. But they were just a tiny, few people. These are the real history books.”
“Then I’m somebody in history?”
“You and me and Mrs Nugent and Mrs Warren and all of us.”
Once she had discovered that there was a kind of equality in the writing down of events in the parish records (“Even Bishops and even the king,” as Mr Warren had said), she spent much time laboriously copying down bits of information in her unformed writing.
One day she had rushed into Cantle. “Mother, Mother, I found father. It says, ‘Nugent, Tomas Chester Bertram. Mother, Alice Mary; Father, George Chester, Farmer.’ And the entry was put down in the year 1744.”
Bella Nugent’s face had been a picture as she’d looked out from the hen-house.
And now on their silent ride between Up Teg and Croud Cantle, Bella wondered whether this learning hadn’t gone a bit too far, going into history and examining things.
Knowing that Bella never let the sun go down on her wrath, or anything else that could be settled, Jude guessed that her mother would say something over supper.
“Jude, you’re twelve. You’re not a child no more. People make allowances when you’re growing up, but not once you’re a woman. You are a good girl at your work, and I haven’t got no complaints on that score. And I’m glad to see you happy. And I like you to have interests and I like listening to you and all that.”
She paused, hoping Jude would say something so that she could jump to the point she was trying to reach, and say, “That’s just what I mean.” But Jude wasn’t having it. If Bella was going to tell her off, she wasn’t going to make it any easier for her.
“It’s time you thought a bit more about what you’re doing and got a bit more serious.”