by Betty Burton
“Oh, Fred, it’s all so vague in my mind,” I said, “but what I should really like to do is to start giving lessons to all the Cantle children, like you did to me. Sunday afternoon and an hour or so at other times. It’d have to fit in with their work, like it did with me.”
Fred’s expression was lit with interest and enthusiasm for my idea.
“You’d have a hard job to get them, Judeth. There’s few poor families that can afford to have their children idle. Times are too hard.”
I have noticed many times, when Fred is enthused with thoughts of an ideal world, how his eyes sharpen, he makes extravagant expressions with his hands and becomes a speaking pamphlet. It is then that he is at his most endearing.
“But if we could do it. . . Judeth, if you end ignorance, you end poverty; if you end poverty, you end all the afflictions of mankind!”
I soon had to leave him and go back to Johnny-twoey, but by that time Fred was already talking of “we”, and said that he would put his mind to it and we would meet again to see what we might do.
“The scheme needs a benefactor, Judeth. It needs a little money.”
“Why?”
“It will fail if you don’t have some time and a few materials. You’d need another hand to take on some of your work, a room somewhere, slates. Judeth, if we are going to try, then we have to do it in the very best way we can. It’s not going to be like me teaching you and you teaching that boy. Everyone is not as enlightened as your mother.”
I left him, pondering that thought. My mother was enlightened? Yet something must have prompted her to make the arrangement with Fred, to have bought me a book in which to write. Now she was beginning to take a bit of interest in Johnny-twoey; preparing something for him to eat when he came in for his lesson; commenting, “That an’t bad, Boy”, or, “You’m coming on”.
In July, Mrs Warren gave birth to a girl; a pale little creature with a misshapen head and bruised from its struggle into the world. It happened the day before Market Day, so I went to see her after we had finished our selling. She was bright-eyed and flushed. The long and agonising labour that she had been anticipating with fear for six months had proved to be longer and more agonising than she had ever imagined; but that was all over now. She had what she wanted, another girl – because you could always dress up a girl so pretty. I was pleased for her, knowing how much pleasure she had got from getting me into a silk dress and showing me off at the party as her handiwork.
The baby, being very small and weak anyway, had not the strength to stand up to its own birth, and died after three days. Mrs Warren’s pink, bright-eyed appearance turned out not to be that of health, but the onset of child-bed fever, from which she died only days after the baby.
I went to pay respects before the funeral. Looking down upon her, with her curls showing upon her forehead, and with the child in her arms, she looked more like a pretty girl holding a doll than a matron of thirty-five. Fred appeared bewildered at the funeral, staring into space and having to be prompted by young Peg, who was already trying to take the place of her mother by comforting Freddie, Jack and Sam.
Mrs Warren did not lack company of women in the churchyard that year. There were so many deaths from the child-bed that charms and spells that had not been needed for generations were made by grandmothers. The Canon of Blackbrook Abbey, on hearing it rumoured that the dark arts of women were again rife, spoke loud warnings of damnation and denounced the women who put faith in the practices of heathens and witches. But many women, in dreadful fear when their rime approached, and knowing from experience that grandmothers were wise as Canons, received whispered advice from old women. As there were more women who survived the scourge than died from it, the reputation of the grandmothers rose high, and for a year, charlock all but disappeared from the fields and waste places.
On the Sunday following the death of Mrs Warren, I could not bring myself to attend church. I had nothing to say to a God who could throw misery about the world like handfuls of gravel, scattering it without knowing or caring where it fell. Nor would I attend the service for the sake of appearances. A God of Love? A Heavenly Father?
I thought it a great pity that our Creator was not a Heavenly Mother, who might be a little on the side of the women; of Jaen and Mrs Warren. And perhaps to understand women like myself, who have additional needs to those of motherhood to fulfil, and would not think it unnatural to seek to find fulfilment. God gave men a free gift of parenthood, yet had made women pay a high price for it.
As Jaen had said, if I’d have been a man I could have gone to sea. If I’d been a father, too, I could have gone to sea. That was the entire difference between my mother and my father, between Will and me, between Fred and Mrs Warren. Becoming a father had never distended a man’s legs with water. A man’s part in the begetting of his child was in pleasure. If the woman had pleasure it was paid for: by shame, sometimes, and worry, always by pain, and very often by death. I could talk to no one of my blasphemous thoughts.
My mother made little comment when I said that I should not go. Since Hanna had been taken away we had had few arguments. She was uninterested, spiritless and let me go my own way, saying only, “Ah, you’m too deep for me these days.” After I had missed Morning Service for several weeks, Reverend Tripp waylaid my mother at the church door: “I told him, it wa’nt no good asking me what you was up to these days.”
On Easter Sunday, when I had said that I would go over to Newton Clare my mother had said that her back was playing her up too much from all the planting. I believe that she could not stand seeing not only Jaen attached to the Hazelhurst clan, but now Hanna also. It did not matter how often Mother said that Hanna was an Estover to her fingertips, there was no getting over the fact that she was Hanna Hazelhurst, and my mother could not bear it.
So I let this be the promised outing for Johnny-twoey. He had not had much time to prove that he would keep his side of our bargain, but I was very sure now that he would.
In the eight or so years that he had lived at Croud Cantle, he had rarely been further than the church, except on a few occasions when he had gone down to the ramshackle cottage in which the rest of the many members of the Toose family lived. Certainly, until he began going to market, he had never been out of Cantle parish. The more aware I became that it was not an inarticulate, almost invisible hand who had been working for us for all those years, but a person – a John Toose – the more I felt that we owed him, not simply the unpaid wages that Hanna and he had talked of, but some experience.
To go over Tradden on a morning like that Easter Sunday was of such pleasure to me that I wanted nothing better than to be there for eternity. The bramblings that had been about in unusual numbers during the long, hard frosts, had flown and had been replaced by swallows and cuckoos. Corn buntings were jingling and I looked for a nest. I wanted to see what the lad had to say about bunting eggs, which look as though they have handwriting upon them. He looked puzzled, and said so seriously that I was not sure whether he meant it or no, “Miss Jude? They’m very small kind of words.” Meadow pipits climbed singing into the sky, only to be outsung and outdone, as always, by their rivals, the larks. Bees pushed their way into early purple orchids and dead-nettles. Although it was early for butterflies, a few brimstones, peacocks and, my favourites, the blues, flittered about on routes that were as complicated as scribble, in search of flowers ripe with the honey-dew into which they uncurled their tongues. There were even one or two slow-worms, elegant creatures, curled and still, sunning themselves and looking like brooches and clasps wrought from gold or bronze and dropped by some passer-by.
The visit at Ham Ford was not a success. It wrenched at my heart to see Hanna. At Croud Cantle she had been a hard, willing little worker, taking her share in everything she could manage; but in her parent’s home she appeared to be working equally with the paid girls. I know it was Sunday and it was quite likely the other children had their chores during the week, but it did seem to me that in the
very short time she had been living there, all of them seemed to take it for granted that Hanna would fetch and carry.
She asked if she could take John to see the farm. “Ah, all of you clear off out for half an hour,” Dan told them. Hanna’s face dropped; I saw that she wanted John to herself. I said that I would go with them, thinking that I could take my small nephews away from Hanna and John.
“Oh no, Ju, stop and talk with me. We shan’t have long,” Jaen said. But Dan’s great length stretched out as he dozed acted as a barrier to free talk. Jaen could not walk outside with me. Her legs and feet were now so distended that if she pressed them the indentation stayed like a finger imprinted in bread dough.
I asked Jaen how Hanna was settling in. “She’s all right, Ju, you don’t have to worry about her. She says it’s noisy here.” Jaen smiled wryly. “Sometimes I think noisy an’t the word for it. When they’m falling out with each other, it sounds like feeding time in the piggery. She a get used to it. She’s a nice little thing.”
A nice little thing! If Dan had not been there I should have been more frank about what I thought about them treating Hanna more like a village girl than a daughter. But the Hazelhurst men were all touchy, and if I wanted to make sure that I would always be welcome to visit my sister and my niece, I had to watch my tongue – as mother and I had always done – to keep him sweet.
Most of the information I got about Hanna was from Johnny-twoey. When we left, Hanna had been polite and straight-faced with me.
“Hanny says she can probably come back after the baby’s birthed. Can she, Miss Jude?”
“I should be surprised. It’s her home there.”
Jaen’s sixth son was, as she had predicted, a Hazelhurst, large and loud. There was less than seven years’ difference in age between Little Dan’l and baby George, and all six were as alike as peas in a pod. After Daniel, Baxter, Francis, Richard and Gregory, they had run out of family names, so this baby was given George, after the king. Like Hanna, he was inconveniently born in August, when every hand was needed in the fields, so it fell to Hanna to help Jaen through the three weeks in her bed.
It was, I believe, George’s birth that helped sustain Hanna during the great change that took place in her life. She became fiercely attached to the baby; willing to share him only with my mother and, of necessity, Jaen. She dressed and rocked and carried him about, for all the world like a wren or a meadow pipit caring for a cuckoo. On two Sundays, Johnny-twoey had gone to Newton Clare on his own.
Since he had been doing the market, I saw to it that he was paid wages properly.
Mother was reluctant. “He chose himself to come here. He’ve been kept all these years, and I’ve always give Amos Toose something for his lad.”
How could you say that the small boy had “chosen” to come? He had been sent by his father. In my opinion, now that the lad was over fourteen, some proper arrangement had to be made. I ticked off on my fingers the amount of work he had done, even when he was a small boy. She had to agree that it wasn’t all one way, and from the time that he was ten or eleven, he had been more than earning his keep. She was adamant, though, when I suggested that we owed back wages. “Mos Toose have had one less mouth to feed all these years,” was her final word. So what I did was to allow the boy to keep a few pence from the sale of the-herbs and salads that he grew so well and that had become an important part of our sales.
One Sunday Johnny-twoey went to Newton Clare alone. On market day of that week, he had spent much time and asked my advice several times about buying a thing for Hanny. What he finally decided upon was a discoloured brass bell, not much larger than a thimble, that he found on a dealer’s tray of penny and ha’penny bargains.
“Miss Jude? He a be all right when I cleaned him.” And so it was. After he had removed the grime with vinegar and salt, he burnished the brass until it was smooth and gleaming. I guessed why he had chosen the bell. When he had finished cleaning it, he brought it to me to see, flushed with pleasure at the first purchase that he had ever made.
“Miss Jude? I a tell you why I got the bell. It’s a joke on Hanny, because she tole me that the birth-mark that Little Lady Geraldine had on her was a bull and it wa’nt, was it? I shan’t tell her that’s why, though, on account of she won’t like it if she finds out I read it for myself that it was bell and not bull. Perhaps one day she a find out, when she comes back and starts learning again. Then I sh’ll tease her on it.”
That was probably the longest speech the lad had ever made to anyone other than Hanna. I felt pleased that he was gaining confidence.
“Miz Hazelhurst gid me a dinner, but I didn’t tell any a they about Hanny’s present. She don’t want they to know.”
From rime to rime over the next months, Will called at Croud Cantle whenever he was near. I watched for him when I was at the market, and was disappointed if he was away and did not come to see me. It was foolish. It was I who had made up my mind not to marry. No one had forbidden me: those closest to me – Mother, Jaen, Hanna, Fred Warren – would have been delighted. Yet not foolish, for I had no control over the kind of emotions that attacked me. The more I tried to put him out of my mind, the more vivid was my sense of him. When he was out of my presence, I could not bring his whole face to mind, I could bring only one feature at a rime into focus; yet I was aware of every hair, every pore and cell of him, and found it strange to think that there was a place where he existed and people who could see him when I could not.
His visits at home were pleasure and pain. If he stopped for a meal I had sometimes to force my eyes away from him, from his mouth; the pointed formation of his front teeth as he bit hard into an apple, his lips glistening with juice; from his eyes which, catching me out in looking at him, half-closed their long-lashed lids and raised them to me, passing a message that Rev. Tripp would consider sinful between unmarried people.
I took to not looking directly at him, but soon found that a lock of hair curling into his ear, or the contrast between the smooth skin on his upper face and the textured lower part, were almost as disturbing to me as a direct look. The moons on his finger-nails, the curling hair on the backs of his warm, dry hands, and their sinews as he held riding crop or dinner-knife; his blunt finger ends tapping the table-top as he emphasised a point. If he laid a hand on the table, I was the table; if he rasped his chin with his hand when considering a question, the sensation was repeated in my own hand. Had there been some law wherein it was laid down that Judeth Nugent must become the wife of Will Vickery, I should gladly have obeyed. As it was, the decision was mine. That was the pain.
When he left, it was suddenly. Two days before Christmas, almost exactly a year since we had loved one another; a year since I had felt the frost of Tradden beneath me and the warmth of Will above; a year since I first had to contend with not only my brain being on fire, but my body also. I wanted Will, I wanted children, I wanted . . . Ah, what was that third thing that I wanted . . . wanted so much that I turned away from the other two?
He came to the farm in the morning. Dull December. A morning of gloom against the coming, official joy of the celebration of Bethlehem. Its sombreness seemed more appropriate in view of the experience of some of the mothers, more humble than the Virgin, who were known to me: Jaen, with her ruined legs and poor pod of a body, Mrs Warren, and other child-bed women who had, by proxy, fed their babies whilst still in the womb on Croud Cantle butter, honey and salads and who were now in a neat, new row together in Blackbrook churchyard.
Clouds were thick and low, saturated with the moisture that they would not release so that they could drift up and on towards Sussex. The Cantle valley was dark and oppressed, and had been for days. The hills were gloomy and heavy, as though their bones were not chalk but granite; the folds and crevices in Tradden and Old Marl were black, and distant Winchester was almost obscure for want of light. The river Dunnock lay across the valley like a hawser made of lead.
“Judeth. My chance has come. There’s something going o
n in the North. The fellow I met last winter has asked me to join him.” He did not say what he was going north to do: I did not ask, nor did I wish to know. It would be better not to have any image of what his life there might be.
I did not trust my voice, so I nodded and secured my bottom lip from within, nipping it with my front teeth.
“Won’t you even think of coming next year, perhaps? I would not press you to get married, only to join me – join us – as a member of the group who are working to change events.”
I shook my head. He knew that I was unlikely to change my mind. He looked crestfallen, but not so distracted that his new venture would be seriously inconvenienced. I believe I hoped that he might find someone more suited than I to fulfilling what he needed in a wife, but whether that is true or a myth that I have made for myself I cannot truly say. It is most likely that it is myth, for as I rejected him, I wanted him more than ever. I hesitate to say “loved him”, for had I truly loved him, then I believe that I could not have let him go without me.
In many ways we were two of a kind. Passionate, sensuous, selfish and single-minded. Had my single-mindedness led me to domesticity, then we might have been as happy as two people living together could be. As we said our farewells, I trusted myself once more to hold his face briefly between my hands. I held his ears and ran my fingers down his jaw, feeling its shape, feeling the texture. And smelling again the earthy, tantalising, warm scent of grain that drifted from his cloak.