by Betty Burton
I could not imagine what he was describing.
“It sounds as though it would be a great muddle. Hundreds of people, all working in one building: why, the noise alone would send anyone mad.”
“It wouldn’t be a muddle. Everything will be separated out. In one place there’d be rows and rows of spinners, say; in the next there’d be all the weavers; and so on and so on. Any sort of an article will be made in that way. From toasting forks to shoes.”
“Do you mean that the grain merchants will work like this? I can’t see how. And why would you have to go so far from where it’s all grown.”
“No, no. I’d not be staying in the grain trade. What’s been offered to me is the chance to do something so exciting as to make your hair stand up.”
His eyes sparkled and he seemed exhilarated with the vision.
“If you believed in Fate, you’d say that’s what it was that sent me to lodgings where there was staying . . . Ah, that doesn’t matter, the how it came about.”
He gathered his thoughts again.
“When this new way gets going, of putting hundreds of weavers under one roof, there’s a terrible danger: the power of one man over the many he employs.”
“I can’t see that it will be any different from what it’s always been here. The same as Harry Goodenstone; they’ve always been able to do as they want.”
“Ah, sure, but can you imagine what it will be like when every man in a town works for the same master? It could be even worse than that. Whole counties could be given over to one kind of skill. Say every pair of boots was made in one place – you think I’m an eejit, but that’s what it will be like. Can you imagine the power that one master would have? It wouldn’t be a matter of a few families from several villages tramping the countryside looking for work: it’d be whole towns, whole counties.”
“All right, supposing a whole town is given over to making the boots. How ever would the boots get from there to here?”
“Roads, roads and more roads. A great network of turnpikes between the towns. All those men who are tramping about looking for work will soon find it, making all the new roads.”
“I can’t say that is a very rosy future for them.”
“It isn’t, but if these new labouring guilds get going, then men will be able to stand up for one another. Imagine, Judeth, imagine Goodenstone’s estate manager says he’s going to finish with sheep and go in for grain, and he throws the shepherds off the estate and out of their cottages. Now, what if every farm worker in this valley refused to work at any job? What if every farm worker in Hampshire refused to work . . . every farm worker in the country . . . until the Goodenstones worked out some decent arrangement with the shepherds?”
“It would need a lot of organising.”
“It will, but you have to start somewhere. It’s already started. It’s what I want to do, Judeth. I want to be in on making this new sort of guild possible. It’d be the means of changing everything, turning it all upside down. Men’d be their own masters. There’s no end to what men could do if they was organised together. Like an army, except that it’d be fighting for a better sort of life, a fairer share out. It’s the same thing you want. If we got married, we could go for a while to the north, learn, then come back here and start organising cowmen, builders, carpenters into great guilds of workers.”
My mother’s presence overhead forced him to speak quietly, and this restraint caused his enthusiasm to sparkle in his eyes and tense one hand into a fist, which he kept thudding into the other in emphasis. He caught my hand and pressed my fingers right. “Judeth, it’d be the most satisfying life imaginable, wouldn’t it?”
I did not know what to answer. He was so fired with enthusiasm that I felt myself being singed by those same flames. I withdrew my fingers from his hold and put a log on the real fire.
The wind was still gusting round the chimney, plunging down into it and sending white wood-ash and smoke into the room, then sucking back again, sparkling and crackling dry bits of bark. The dairy door, which had needed oiling weeks ago, creaked and squeaked its hinges. The apple tree close to the house clicked and clattered the long shoots of last season’s growth. The chain that held the yard gate rattled as the wind forced against it. All this restlessness and noise had been going on for hours, but it was only when I tried to take in what Will had said that I found it disturbing. I have never liked blustering winds.
“It would be satisfying, Will. Even if it doesn’t succeed, it would be satisfying.”
He looked directly at me as he had earlier and said again, “Marry me, Judeth.”
“No, Will,” I answered again.
He thrust his lips and eyebrows into an expression of disappointed resignation, but I believe that he was well able to accept it in his enthusiasm for his new work.
“Why won’t you, Judeth? We’d make such a pair.”
“You’d be celibate then?”
He was half-smiling and puzzled.
“Will, we’d never be a pair in the way you’re suggesting. We should likely have a child every year, and what sort of a guild missionary should I make then? No, Will, until there’s some way for women to have families or not have them, as they choose, then there isn’t a chance for us to do anything or be anything.”
“You would be a great help and support to me, Judeth. To have a wife on your side, a wife who believed in the radical changes we’d be working for . . . why, I can’t tell you how much help it’d be.”
“If I said, ‘All right, Will, we’ll get married, but I’ve got such a burning ambition to . . . to, say, teach all the poor children in Cantle and Motte to read and write because once you can read and write the world becomes different, and you begin to understand why We does the work and They get the rewards?’ If I said to you, ‘I believe it would turn the world upside down, and you’d be such a help to me if you would stop at home and cook and clean and raise our children – would you marry me, Will?”
As I spoke, I discovered that what had been a rag-bag of thoughts seemed to stitch themselves together into a patchwork whole. What came out made sense. I had never spoken at such length to him. Our exchanges had previously been a tacking-on of my ideas to his, for the most part because we did have a basic agreement: that the unjust society in which we lived must be changed. I believe that he was quite surprised to hear that I could suggest an ideal equal to his own.
It was not until I had finished my outburst that I realised that tears were running down my cheeks. I was rejecting a chance of a life with this compassionate, ardent, intelligent man. If my mind was on fire with the desire to be filled with learning, then my body was equally on fire for desire to be filled with Will Vickery.
But it was not many hours since Jaen had torn her cap from her ruined hair and lifted her skirts to show her distorted legs, and said, “Look at me, Ju. Go on, look!”
When we parted early next morning, Will kissed me gently, more like a brother than a lover. “Your way is more likely to turn the world upside down than mine.”
On that morning, the wind had dropped and it was beginning to feel more like spring. I was filled with a strange mixture of feelings: sadness, relief, calm; as well as feelings of excitement, anticipation. I was expecting to have to spend time searching for the donkey that had run off, but it was calmly cropping the grass close to the gate.
My mother came into the yard to bring Will cold meat from yesterday and some bread wrapped in a cloth. She had dark rings of sleeplessness around her eyes. As soon as he was gone we each started our daily tasks. As she went off into the dairy, Mother said, “It’s none of Dicken’s business, but he a go ferreting on till he makes summat of it. You tell him what you like, but I don’t want not a single word about it spoke to me,” and she went off to uncloth some cheeses for Thursday’s market.
I found Dicken mending and sharpening some tools and told him that Hanna was gone to stay at Newton Clare.
“Master won’t like that, then, I’ll be bound. B
e her acomin’ back, then? I always said she wouldn’t never stop here long, not once she was big enough to give Miss Jaen a hand. Miss Jaen all right?” Dicken was like the bees: if you did not tell him what was going on, there was trouble. I have no doubt that every happening at Croud Cantle was related at the Dragon and Fount, probably with embellishments; for Dicken was one for gossip.
I then went to find Johnny-twoey. Yesterday, as I was leaving Ham Ford, Hanna had fastened her arms in a dead-lock about my neck. As I unwrapped myself, she said with great earnestness, “Tell John that I haven’t left him, Jude. You’ve got to tell him. Please, Jude, please don’t forget. He won’t have anybody now. He will stop talking again.”
“It’s all right,” I told her. “He’ll have me.”
“But you won’t always stay there. I was going to stay there.” She sturdily swallowed her misery.
I promised her that at least for now I would see that he did not stop talking again, and that I would bring her messages from him the next time I came to see her.
As always when I spoke to John Toose, he flushed shiny red.
“John.”
“Yes, Miss Jude.”
“John, Hanna is stopping over at Newton Clare.”
“Yes, Miss Jude?”
I felt quite sorry for the lad. He would miss Hanna’s companionship. Amost a foundling, he had been living and working on Croud Cantle since the very day we brought Hanna to stay. As he stood there, as he had throughout his young life, waiting for someone else to order his day, I realised that he deserved more than a brief half-truth of a message. John Toose owned a small china blue-bird, a present from Hanna. Only she had known that John Toose was a boy who would rather have a china bird than a twist of fair-mint sweet as a gift.
“No, John, that’s not the real truth. Hanna has gone to live with her mother and father.”
An even deeper flush and a tightening of the muscles round his mouth were the only signs of his feelings that I could see, plus the fact that he did not say, “Yes, Miss Jude”.
“She has a mother and father, and brothers, so it is probably best for her to live with them.”
“So have I got, too. I got a mother and father. We said – Hanny said, and so did I – about that. We was better here than there. I said, and so did Hanny, that it was better being just one on your own, not having to be with them. They must a made her go there. She wouldn’t a gone unless they made her.” Adding a “Miss Jude” a few seconds after his quiet-spoken, halting outburst.
“She gave me a message to tell you. She said be sure to say that she hasn’t left you.”
A small glow of pleasure lit his face.
“That’s all right then, Miss Jude.”
He stood, patiently awaiting anything else I had to say. “ . . . because once you can read and write, the world becomes different, and you begin to understand why We does the work and They get the rewards . . .” My own theoretical ideals turned upon me and attacked. To young John Toose, at the very bottom of the heap, I was “They”.
Twisting my promise to Hanna that I would not let John slip back into not talking, I said, “I promised Hanna . . . would you like me to teach you to read?”
“Miss Jude ? I can read.”
I knew that he could not, for he had never been a day off the farm in years.
“Miss Jude? ‘Little Lady Geraldine’ – every time I was good, Hanny read it to me.”
I smiled inwardly as I imagined the scene. Square little Hanna, who found it such an imposition to have her lessons, rewarding the tall lad with a “reading” of the story I had written for her and which she knew by heart.
“Well, then, that’s a good start,” I said.
I said that he could come into the kitchen for one hour every evening, and I would show him how to go on with his reading, and perhaps later to learn his letters, and he said, Yes, Miss Jude, at every juncture. I was just walking away when he came after me. “Miss Jude? Would you . . . ? would they . . . ? If I could just go and see Hanny sometimes. So I could see she was all right. I wouldn’t get lost, I shouldn’t think. I could ask Dicken how to get there. I would do my work just the same.”
“I’ll do a barter with you. If you work hard at the lessons I shall give you, I’ll start taking you to market so you’ll learn that, and the next time I go over to Newton Clare, you shall come too.”
I had said to Will that once you read and write the world becomes a different place, and in teaching John Toose that is what happened. However, it did not come about in the way I had been speaking of, because it was for me that the world became a different place. I remember Fred Warren once telling my mother that it was a pleasure to teach me, for I absorbed what he taught me like parched earth, or something like that. If that is so, then I understand what he meant by it. After the trudging, cajoling and pushing to try to get Hanna to learn something, teaching John Toose was as different to teaching Hanna as the flight of a sparrow-hawk is to that of a broody hen. If you showed him a speck of knowledge, he swooped down upon it, devoured it, and hovered waiting for more.
I was sure that my mother would not like the idea of him going to stand on the market, and was prepared to have to stand up to her to get my way, but she said that it wasn’t a bad idea because her legs had been playing her up going all that way to Blackbrook, most of the old ones were gone on, and the market wasn’t the same now the young ones was taking over. And so, without any great to-do, Mother, who had held Nugent’s stand outside The Star for twenty-odd years, stopped going to market.
As soon as Will had gone on that Monday morning, I told Mother that Will had asked me to marry him and that I had said no.
“It’s your life, I suppose, but you mark me, you’re going to live to regret it.”
Throughout the following year very little changed in the routine of our work. We missed Hanna deeply. At first, the pain and loneliness without her was unremitting, then slowly I was able to fill the space in our lives that had been hers so that in time I could go for an entire morning without thinking about her; but she was never really far from my thoughts. It was at that time of day when she would have been washing her hands and getting into her night-shift that was worse, when she would play mother and me off against each other for the favour of seeing her into bed. But I filled the space that been hers with other things, believing it best not to dwell on that which cannot be altered.
John Toose entered into our lives rather more than previously. At first, when he came for his lesson, Mother – also I suppose filling Hanna’s space – would sit apparently absorbed in one of her evening occupations, rubbing herbs, spinning, or cutting little covers for preserve jars or for patchwork. Gradually she began to take notice of what was going on.
“What was that bit again, Boy?” or, “That an’t never right.” Sometimes she gave him the big Bible and asked him to read the Begats, or the In The Beginning. One evening after I had read The Song of Solomon, she said, “Now, if you could write summat like that, Jude, it’d been worth it.” I did not ask what the “it” was.
Johnny-twoey (I made every effort to remember to call him John when speaking of him, or to him, but the name that he brought with him as a child was difficult to drop) came in for his reading lesson every evening, except on those days at the height of planting and harvesting when we all had to work till we dropped. However, Hanna’s repetitive recitation of Little Lady Geraldine had given him a good start, as he could already recognise a fair number of words from their pattern and shape. It was a good method for teaching a boy who found it easy to distinguish five or six different varieties of mint which, to most people, looked very similar. He had no difficulty in telling apart such words as “Lordship” and “Ladyship”, so I continued teaching him by showing him a word and telling him what it was.
I thought often about his kind of ability, and began to wonder whether John Toose’s ability was not exceptional, whether I was not the oddity that I seemed to be. Perhaps all the rest of the Toose children
, Cantle children, crow-scaring children everywhere, were equally capable: all that any child needed was the interest and the opportunity to learn.
He was not the best of market traders, being too shy to approach people, except when explaining to a housewife about some herb or flavouring he had succeeded in developing in the plot at Croud Cantle.
I saw Fred Warren quite frequently on market days, and Mrs Warren made it her business to come and talk for a few minutes until, round about May and June time, she became too breathless from carrying her expected child to walk very far. And now that Mother had given up going to market, I could never leave the stand for more than a few minutes. However, on one occasion, I did go and talk with Fred in the front room of The Star, where I could keep an eye on John Toose.
“I’m sorry that you refused Will,” he said. “I’d have thought that he would have been right for you, Judeth. He’s hit hard by you not accepting him. I should have thought you could have put your brains to work with him. He’s going as soon as I can find somebody to replace him, you know? I only wish I had the chance to be involved in it all. Mankind is on the verge of a great leap forward.”
I said that yes, I knew, and that likely my mother was right and I should live to regret it.
“Would you have married him if he’d have stayed here, working for White’s? If he’d have been more steady?”
I would not have been kind to tell him that, had that happened, Will and I should probably have become a replica of himself and Mrs Warren; that I shrivelled at the thought of living the conventional, smothering life of a Blackbrook trader’s wife, a second-hand life, filtered through the husband’s experience.
Perhaps I do Fred Warren an injustice, for over the years he had encouraged me to look beyond the end of my nose and to read pamphlets by visionary thinkers, but I believe that his own reformist views – as with those of Will – did not go as far as reforming his own scullery and kitchen. Womankind was not about to take a great leap forward. But I had such a warm regard for my old tutor that I never liked to say anything that appeared in any way to reflect badly on his views. So in answering him, I jokingly said, “That’s too many ‘ifs’ for me to sort out,” and went on to talk to him about Johnny-twoey.