by Betty Burton
My mind was in uproar. A muddle of thoughts. A swarm buzzing. Ideas and fears, confidence and doubt. But, running through the chaos was a straight, calm line. It was like a beam of light shining through a hole into the dark: it was direction and fulfilment, it was self-respect and dignity. All those other things that were going on in my mind were mere moths and midges flitting around the steady beam.
I made no bones about it to my mother.
She was sitting on the little bench in the porch, watching her red tiles dry off.
“Well?”
“I’m going to be a teacher.”
“A what?”
I think it would have made as much sense to her had I said, I’m going to be an organ-grinder with a monkey.
“Well, we can’t sit around here all day. You wasted enough time as it is.”
Fridays at Croud Cantle have always been given over to the clearing up after going to market. Baskets, boxes, jars and all kinds of containers have to be scrubbed with soda, scoured with salt, bleached, dried, and made ready for re-use. I put on my old skirt and sacking apron and started on this least pleasing of all the tedious jobs about the farm.
As we worked, I told her of the scheme and quickly put her mind at rest about taking on extra hands to do that work on the farm which I would have to give up.
“He wants me to teach. Well, not him, his wife that’s going to be. Teach the village children, like I’m teaching Johnny-twoey.”
“Oh, that’ll do’m a world of good.”
My mother’s reaction was probably typical of others that I would encounter. People who worked the land, lived from hand to mouth on next to nothing. As soon as a child could walk it was set on the road of labour that it would follow all its life, so how many fathers would send their sons into a classroom when they might be earning their bread following the plough. There would be some who would be able to see beyond the downs, and I would have to start there and hope that others would follow.
“It will do them a lot of good in the long run. Things won’t change overnight.”
I could have wished that our benefactress had been different, but beggars can’t be choosers.
My own view of the “lady of a sweet nature and of philanthropic views” was uncoloured by her immense fortune and whatever else it was Harry Goodenstone saw in her: my description might have been “sentimental and self-indulgent”. She was a widow, four years younger and four inches taller than Young Harry and had a love of hats on which perched many tiny, stuffed birds. The ten years of her previous marriage had made her a dignified matron at thirty-one, different in every respect to the dainty pink and white Mrs Trowell. Perhaps that is why Harry Goodenstone settled upon this lady, or perhaps he wished for a more motherly woman in his life.
On my first interview with her she told me at length how she had once heard a sermon spoken by a wayside preacher, “of a most stirring and poetic turn of phrase”, and upon discovering that he was once a ploughboy and had been taught to read, she had ever since thought what an infinitely better place any village would be if the poor could be taught to read in the manner of that preacher.
As she was telling me this, my hopes sank. I remembered what Fred Warren had told me about a charity school he had once attended where poor children received very elementary instruction in their letters and a great amount of teaching about the touching of forelocks, curtseying and other graces that would make them less hobbledehoyish when they went as servants. I was determined that I would have nothing of that and questioned her politely about what I might do.
“I leave it entirely up to you. Mr Goodenstone has recommended you as a labouring child who learned to read. Indeed, he told me how he discovered you first – studying in the church, was it not?”
I said, yes, I had done a great deal of work there. I did not mislead her, neither did I tell her much about what I hoped to do. I knew that I was treading on shifting sands. I passionately wanted her school – no, not her school, my school.
The next time I went to Blackbrook I talked to Fred about the plan. He was very excited and said that he would ride over to Cantle on the following Sunday. It had been my intention to find a room and let it be known in Cantle that here was a school for any child who wished to come.
“Why should they want to come, Judeth?”
The answer ought to have been simple, but I did not know it. I never really understood what it was that prompted me to want to bend my mind to learning, puzzling, remembering facts. But I did know how the reluctant Hanna could be persuaded and what it was that drew Johnny-twoey. It was the “and then? and then?”
“Curiosity, Fred. I shall begin by reading to whatever child I can persuade to come, and each time I shall stop at a point where they want to know, ‘and then what happened?’ But they shan’t know until they have learned one letter, a word, a fact; anything.”
“A carrot hung before the donkey to make him move?”
“Not quite. Usually the donkey doesn’t get the carrot until the end of the journey, but my children will get a bite of it every time they take one step forward: not enough to satisfy them, but enough to get the taste for more.”
That seemed to be perfectly sound reasoning and Fred said that he would like to help me. “It’s what I need, Judeth.”
He was right. Since the death of Mrs Warren, he seemed to have lost all his enthusiasm.
“Losing Molly and Will together like that,” he added.
I was surprised to hear him speak of Will like that.
“Do you miss Will? I thought your new man was doing very well.”
“I never liked any man so much as Will. It’s not to do with the business. There was never any man I could be so open with. I doubt if we ever get two chances of finding such friendship.” He tapped the back of my hand with one finger, as he used to do when I was his pupil and had made a stupid error, “You should have married him, Judeth. He might not have gone, if you had said you would have him.”
“And he’d have been straining at one leash to be with his precious group and I should have been straining at another to be making a school, and in the middle would be some poor marriage being strangled to death.”
“You wouldn’t have needed the school. You would have had children of your own. You could have rowed them up at the kitchen table and made that a schoolroom.”
He was making something of a joke of it, but he was half serious. I imagined Jaen, rowing up her flock of little starlings and hobbling round on her ruined legs with a slate in one hand and a ladle in the other, trying to capture rowdy Hazelhurst attention.
“You’re the one that started me off, Fred. You used to ask me where it was all leading, what was I going to do? I thought you wanted me to do something. You didn’t ever say what you thought I could do, just, ‘What are you going to do, Judeth?’ Even when Young Harry started off that business with the books I thought you had some idea that it would lead somewhere. But it didn’t. It was you opened the top of my head and stuffed it full of pamphlets and broadsheets and poems. And now it’s all overflowing. It’s like a bee-wine: when it’s ready you have to keep on giving part of it to somebody else, else it dies.”
“Judeth, you are an extraordinary woman. I shall never know how you came about.”
I had been bent over the table, making notes of what we had been planning, but his changed tone made me look up. His mouth was slightly open and he momentarily closed his eyes, as though controlling a slight pain, but it clearly was not that. I looked down and quickly started writing again. Dear God, how our desires leap out at us when we least expect them! He recovered himself as quickly as I did, but we each knew that he had been watching the rise and fall of my breast, and each knew that his aroused look had, for a moment, roused me. It was a natural, simple desire. He had not had Molly’s warm, jolly form next to him for many months, and Will, who had shown me that my body could soar like a lark, was several days’ ride away.
March 1790
I am my father
’s daughter. I begin to have some understanding. I believe that I understand how, when he saw and desired Charlotte the milk-maid, he took her and did not much heed the consequences. The moment of passion was all. It is what Jaen warned me of in our nature. “You can dout the fires, Jude,” she said. Jaen knows that there are fires. She knows that, at that moment with Dan Hazelhurst, she could not dout hers.
If I had been a son, then I think I must have been another such seducer as my father. I do not believe that I love Will Vickery, yet I have been quite obsessed with thinking of him. It overflows. It is as though I suffer from a malady, a returning fever, a longing for a man. Not any man. I have looked at young men working in the fields, men who are strong and young, and have not found them desirable. At least not so desirable that I would lose control of my feelings and be led into the act as I was with Will.
My desire for Will Vickery is bound up with his being a visionary, a radical. I believe that the moment of fever over Fred today was my awareness of his idealism; the fact that he is a man who is not afraid of revolutionary ideas; a man perhaps willing to flout conventions, to question and to try to change the old, bad order.
If I suffer my “malady” only for radical thinking men, then perhaps I am saved, for I have not found the world is overly full of them.
J.N.
Afterthought.
But then, I do not know the world very well. That was an uninformed statement – the kind of thinking that Fred Warren chides me for.
If desire could pounce upon two friends such as we were, then it was necessary to be cautious and aware. I was determined not to let my body rule my brain. Keep myself aware of the consequences. A shrouded Mrs Warren with her arm encircling her shrouded dead baby; weary Cantle girls of my age, whose only desire was to see their children behind a plough or with a husband; the misery that never left Jaen’s eyes, any more than the pain left her legs; my mother, who had lived with bitterness in her for twenty years or more. The moment of pleasure for women is paid for by a lifetime of pain: the consequence of giving in to desire is subjugation.
I knew that I should have to be careful of stray and wandering thoughts of Will Vickery; then immediately put myself in danger by walking out on to Tradden. I had to live in sight of the place where he had found me unconscious, where we had walked and loved and where he had come to find me on the night of Hanna. Perhaps I went there to test myself, to see if there were ghosts to be laid. There were, and they were vivid, lively shades. Some nights they would visit me and draw sustenance from me in my dreams, leaving me like a moth sucked dry by a spider.
The last time that I had such fevered nights was just before I had run away from the harvest killing. Then I had worked myself into the ground; kept myself awake until I fell into an exhausted sleep because I was afraid of my dreams. Now I allowed the dreams to come, even when they were full of violence and menace I let them come, for I sensed that this was the lesser of two evils.
Squire Goodenstone and the Hon. Amelia Coates were married in June. The whole village was given an unexpected holiday and provided with more food and drink than they had seen in a lifetime.
The feasting and dancing went on long after the couple had been hauled up the drive of Park Manor, in a flower-bedecked carriage, by estate workers. Seeing this I felt sullen and angry that those men did not see the indignity of their action. They were already used as little better than animals by their masters, certainly worse housed and fed, yet would still voluntarily subject themselves to the indignity of actually replacing the horses with themselves. It was just such acts that Will and I had had many conversations about and I wished that he was there to talk to me.
If I did nothing else in my little classroom, then I would try to instil into Cantle children some respect for themselves; open their eyes to the fact that it ought to be the Harry Goodenstones who should perform acts of humility; it was the Harry Goodenstones who owed a debt to the villagers, not the reverse. But I should have to be subtle and it would not take place overnight. What I hoped to do in my little school was something practical to bring about some changes, as Will was doing. It would be a raindrop in a pond, what I could do, but at least I would be doing something. And to achieve anything I would have to smile falsely at the Mrs Goodenstones and Young Harrys of the world. It would be a means to an end – I would never prostrate myself before them in the way that the estate workers did.
When Harry Goodenstone had first spoken to me of the school, it had seemed a very simple thing to do. All that was necessary was to employ someone to replace me on the farm and go to market with John Toose; to find a classroom and make a plan of teaching. By the end of the year only the last two had been accomplished.
It was difficult to find someone to replace me because I had grown up with the work and into the routine. I was everything from manager to labourer. I mended fences, baked Croud Cantle pies and sold them on the market; I kept accounts and records, planted, tended, harvested, killed chickens, took the house-cow to the bull and sat with farrowing sows.
Every suggestion I made seemed not to suit my mother. I would suggest someone who would be good for fieldwork and she would say, “If you thinks one o’ they Gritts is getting their feet under my table, you got another think coming.” Or if I thought of some good dairy women who might be able to cope with the marketing, she’d be too old, too fly-be-night, have sticky fingers, “and we shouldn’t never have a brass farden to our names if we let she loose up here.”
I realised eventually that if the school was ever to get started then I should have to be firm, but I did understand that there would be an enormous upheaval in the way Croud Cantle had been run for years. I also wanted her to be fairly satisfied with the arrangement, or there would for ever be friction. In the end, it was a series of unconnected events that helped solve the problem.
Rob Netherfield, who used to work for us until a few years ago when he married and went to live in Andover, came back to the village. His wife had died giving birth to their second child, and Rob had brought his babies back to where they would have aunts and grandmothers to bring them up whilst he went out to work as a fencer, hedge-layer and general repair man. Rob had always been a favourite with Mother, so when I suggested that we might have an arrangement for him to come in a few hours regularly, she said, “You leave Rob Netherfield to me.”
They were very difficult months for her. I don’t believe that she really thought that my head had been turned by Mrs Goodenstone, but her acid tongue whipped out at me occasionally, “I suppose you won’t want to dirty your hands with that kind of thing now you’m in with the gentry?” Or she would feign ignorance: “Ah, I don’t know nothing about that. I have to leave that to people who’ve been properly learned.”
By one of those coincidences that we tell one another are extraordinary but are, in fact, quite commonplace when we begin to examine the facts, Bob Pointer – who had left us to work for his brother at about the same time as Rob – also returned to Cantle. Bob’s brother had put everything he had into a small herd of dairy cows and had lost everything he owned in an outbreak of cattle fever. He turned up at Croud Cantle looking for work at exactly the right moment. He knew the place like the back of his hand and set to work at once. Almost overnight, then, Croud Cantle was working much as it had done some years before.
The third event that helped to free me was that Ted Carterage, who worked for the Estate, was gored by the Mill Farm bull, leaving Maisie Carterage, to whom he had been married only a few months, a widow. She was also left without a roof over her head when she was turned out of the Estate cottage by the Goodenstone Agent. Maisie, who had worked in the kitchens at Park Manor, was relieved to be given the chance to come and work at Croud Cantle.
We made some hasty renovations to the house. Rob put in a better floor under the roof and mended the walls, so making the attic into reasonable sleeping quarters, one of which Maisie moved into with her few possessions. I continued going to Blackbrook with Johnny on market
days.
By Christmas I was able to go to Mrs Goodenstone and ask her approval of the arrangements I had made. She had agreed to pay me a monthly sum from the time that I took over the back room of a small trading store that had been run by the Bassett family for generations. I believe that it had once been quite a thriving little business, something like a static packman, but now that Annie Bassett was old and befuddled, the shelves held little more than some rusted pins, a few lengths of faded tape and some disintegrating thread.
Christmas brought a letter from Will and as on earlier occasions, when his other letters had disturbed the thick curtain of work with which I surrounded myself, it brought more and vivid dreams. Dreams of thundering horses, tumultuous clouds and fearsome chaos, wherein a small crack appears in the earth and spreads until the entire world needs only a tap for it to shatter into fragments.
Dear Judeth,
I hope that you will read this letter to Mrs Nugent so that she will hear that I wish her health and happiness in the coming year.
It seems both a long and a short time since we had that excellent Christmas dinner and you and I went to look for a holly branch. Do you remember that we did not find the holly and Hanna said that it was a good thing as little goblins with hot needles lived in the red berries? Is Hanna happy now that she has been living with her mother and father for almost two years?
When I read that about the holly to myself, I again thought what a fool Judeth Nugent must be to give up the chance of living with a man such as Will for years of struggle with dull-eyed Cantle children. No, they should not be dull-eyed. I would tell them everything that I knew; brighten their eyes, as Fred Warren had brightened my own when he had taken trouble to teach me.