by Betty Burton
Other people in the village could grow vegetables and milk cows. Only Rev. Tripp and I were in a position to teach Cantle children. But the Rev. Tripp preached the gospel of service to the one on high, and he did not always mean God.
I dreamed of teaching enlightenment. And I began to fee that I had indeed found work that I not only enjoyed and felt satisfied in doing, but work that was purposeful, important.
Dear Judeth
I hope that you have not abandoned your writing. An account of how the Cantle school got started would make interesting reading.
I wish that I could write well, for what is happening in the new manufacturing towns should be recorded.
Good roads are being made everywhere. Great machines are at work. People, people, people. They come daily looking for the promised land and the fortunes that they believe are here for the asking. Some will make fortunes and many will go under in the squalor that is becoming daily worse in some towns. But we are making some progress.
I hope that I shall one day meet your Rob Netherfield. He is right, of course. It is easier to get unity when large numbers of workers living in one area are attached to one type of manufacture, with one employer. On the other hand, if that one employer fails, then huge numbers of workers fail also. An entire city could fail, and I believe that there could be destitution on such a scale as we have never imagined. One thing that we are determined to get employers to agree to is a fund that will be a safeguard against such. It will be one of the most difficult aims to achieve, for They will not like a single penny going from their profits.
Why don’t you make a hook, Judeth? Write it very personally. Relive it and put it down. Write what you felt, even the parts that are painful, and make it into a book. Every letter that you write is like a chapter and I always look forward to receiving the next. Try. I shall buy it directly upon publication.
I had been writing detailed notes for about two years. At the back of my mind I did think that one day I might attempt to write something: perhaps a fictionalised autobiography or a history. Will’s letter prompted me to begin this book.
During these busy months I still went as often as I could to Ham Ford. It was always a stressful day. I usually took John Toose with me, partly because it was only from him that I found out anything at all about Hanna, and partly because seeing John was the only pleasure in my niece’s life. She was now almost as tall as Jaen and me, and if she took after the Estover women, then at this age she was nearly at the height at which she would stay. It seemed to me that, although she was no longer chubby and rosy-faced, she was becoming very beautiful; but then I saw her through the eyes of someone who loved her fiercely, albeit unexpressed.
Jaen often receded into a world of her own where it was almost impossible to meet her. Not always: sometimes she was bright and she would greet me with, “Oh, Ju, I’m that glad you’ve come over. I been thinking about that time when. . .” and she would start talking about some incident in our childhood, going over every detail, correcting me as to whether it was self-heal or hyssop that we had rubbed on to our faces to make our skin violet-coloured, or whether it was on Tradden or Winchester where we found two stones that was alike as twins.
“Have Mother still got them?”
When I said, yes, they were still on the dresser shelf, she asked most earnestly that I should bring them over next time.
“I should love to see them again, Ju. You can’t think how I’d like to see them. They was twin stones. Remember what we said?”
“We was their keepers and they’d been given to us so that they wouldn’t never be parted.”
She had looked so very pleased. “Ju, I’m glad you remembered. If you’d a forgot, it would a been bad. I can talk to you, Ju. Dan only thinks me silly and fanciful. It suddenly came to me that them stones was me and you: that’s why it was us who found them. I’m glad Mother never throwed them out. I tried to talk to Hanna about all them stories we used to tell, but she’s like her father there, she can’t see no magic in anything. She can’t see no pictures in the fire even.”
I asked Jaen if she didn’t think that it might be our mother that Hanna took after, and not the Hazelhursts.
She thought before she answered. “Perhaps after all then, Ju, you and me an’t so much like the Estovers except in our looks. Perhaps we’m like him. I remember him you know. Not just his blue coat. I can remember his face sometimes. He had a beautiful face. I wish he hadn’t gone off like that. If he hadn’t a gone off like that we’d a had a father, and then Mother wouldn’t a had to be father and all, and we’d a had a mother too.”
Gradually she withdrew more and more into herself. If Dan was there she made an effort to answer, but she was seldom the initiator of a conversation. When she and I were alone, I think she felt that she could withdraw without criticism, that she did not have to make an effort, that she could be at ease. There were times when she seemed to be like a frail old lady. She would pat my hand and say, “It’s only you understands me, Ju.”
Ben Hannable was quite generous to his “Foundation”. I went with Fred to see him in his Blackbrook house. I never knew him in his early days as the eliman, dealing in dribs and drabs of lamp oil and tallow, but Mother knew how poor the Hannables were. Quite different now. Hannables were the largest dealers in oil and Hannables was Ben Hannable. He was little changed from the man who had asked to marry me when I was seventeen. A woman’s touch was everywhere in his home, but now that Rose Hannable was dead, it was overlaid with careless masculinity: boots and dogs on the hearth; fowling guns leaning against walls; tobacco smoke on the air.
“Well, Missie, Warren says you want some money.”
“Not exactly me, Mr Hannable . . .”
“Ben,” he interrupted, “Ben, seeing as you might ha’ been Mrs Hannable. Then you wouldn’t a had to come cap in hand, Missie. You could a had all this lot.”
He made an expansive gesture towards the crystal spirit bottles and glasses, oil paintings, swathed velvet and brocade curtains and plump chairs with embroidered seats.
“What do you think, Warren, eh? Her mother wouldn’t have me when we was young. Then Missie here wouldn’t have me neither. She’d a had a better deal than Bella, too. I was only just starting out when I asked Bella Estover. Be the time Missie here was of age I’d got a tidy long stocking. You should a had me, Missie. I always had a fancy for red hair.”
On the surface, his manner implied that it had not mattered one jot that he had not been able to satisfy his fancy for red hair, but I suspected that he had resented, even if he did not now, his attentions being rejected by a farm girl. He was pot-bellied, almost toothless and quite graceless. His pride in his own achievement, in getting from starveling eliman’s son to wealthy Blackbrook businessman made him a slightly more likeable benefactor than Sir Henry Goodenstone.
The outcome of the visit was a promise from him that he would keep the school going for two years, provided I taught numbers.
“It’s how I got where I am today. Inches in a foot. Yards in a mile. Two pints, one quart; four quarts, one gallon. Rods, poles and perches. Six eights is forty-eight. Twelve twelves is a hundred and forty-four. Hundred and forty-four is twelve dozen. Twelve dozen to the gross. Twelve pence to the shillin’. One percent discount if you takes four gallons. That’s how I got where I am today! Teach’m that, Missie, and you taught’m summit worth knowing.”
I had swallowed my pride often in the last months, what with the Goodenstones and then having to “return to the fold” to placate Rev. Tripp, who was prepared to bring in the full force of the Church to close me down. So this last was no difficulty. I would do anything to keep the school going; anything so long as I kept my own self-respect. Ben Hannable’s condition on providing some money; Rev. Tripp’s spiteful threat; the Goodenstone’s capriciousness: all this concerned their self-respect – not mine.
With the onset of winter, several more children came, so we had to rearrange the boxes, planks and stools to give them a
ll a fair distribution of the warmth from the fire. That was the one good thing that the Goodenstones did for us. I had asked Sir Henry if the Estate would supply logs and a sack of wheat, and surprisingly he had given his Agent instructions which were never cancelled. So whatever else my little classroom lacked, it never went without fire or fermity.
At the end of the day, each child in turn was given the task of setting the wheat in an iron pot over the embers, and each morning another doled out spoonfuls into the collection of dishes and bowls that we had begged, borrowed and stolen. When our house-cow was milking well, I brought some milk. They bolted the fermity with the speed of the hungry children that they were, and a couple of hours later the scraping of slates was accompanied by the sound of windy bellies and giggles.
Slowly, slowly, one or two of the children began haltingly and laboriously to read a few words and work simple addition. There were no set times for anything. Whatever went on in my classroom depended, as everything else in the Cantle valley, upon the weather, the season, the condition of the crops and nature.
When it was ploughing time, the ten- and eleven-year-old boys came in for only the fifteen minutes that qualified them for the fermity; when the seed had been sown the very littlest children were sent out with tins and boards to scare off the crows and starlings. Girls came and went throughout the day when mothers were laid up in child-bed, and at harvest time I closed up for several weeks, since every child was needed in the fields. I had to admit that bending the brain to understand the difference between two-plus-four and two-times-four would not compete with getting in the harvest.
John Toose, now a seventeen-year-old with a long jaw and the beginnings of a good beard, loved to come into the classroom. He could now read and write well. He had overcome his shyness on the market and was a very good trader. People liked his quiet, broad way of dealing. Fred took the boy under his wing and helped him get papers and booklets on horticultural methods, which John studied and put into practice on the plot that mother had handed over to him some years before. He was very popular in the classroom, where the young children called him Mister Toose.
At Croud Cantle, things were working out very well, for although there was so much poverty and distress amongst the cottagers and land-workers all over the south of England, the people to whom we sold our goods on the market were not much affected by the low wages paid to agricultural workers. We could sell all the vegetables, pies, salads, eggs, cream, fruit, honey and butter that we produced, and now clumps of John Toose’s herbs and herbaceous plants were selling well.
Dicken died in November whilst hacking and cursing a vegetable clamp that had become hard and frozen. According to Bob Pointer, he fell over in mid-kick and stopped living. At nearly sixty years of age, he had outlived almost all of his Cantle contemporaries. He had never been outside the Cantle valley, and had come from his cottage next to the Dragon and Fount, up Howgaite to Croud Cantle every day for most of his life. Yet neither Mother nor I could truthfully say, “We shall miss old Dicken.” There had always been a feeling that he ran with the hare and the hounds. In the middle of saying something, Mother would hush, “Watch out – here’s Dicken,” or, “Mind Dicken don’t hear you,” and gossip fdtering back would show that Dicken would tell anybody anything about what went on under the Nugent’s roof, and was not above fancifulness if it made a good story. And I had never fathomed out whether his referring to us as Master and Master Jude was a jibe at there not being a proper Master, or because the proper Master had run off, or that neither of us was his master. Dicken was a good worker, but Bob Pointer was better, and you had the feeling that Bob truly was a loyal Croud Cantle man.
Fred told me that Ben Hannable had said he would look us over when he was Cantle way, so I was not surprised when he walked into the classroom just before Christmas. In fact I had prepared the children by teaching them some ‘timeses’ by rote. To the children he was a figure of authority, and those whose planks barred his way into the room hastily dismantled their seating and drew back against the wall. He seated himself beside the fire and hands on knees asked, “Well, then, what’s Missie here been teaching you?”
Of course there was silence. Generations of training told them not to be the one to step forward, not the one to be noticed, leave it for somebody else. When the gentry entered their territory it nearly always meant trouble: melt into the landscape, edge away from the front of a crowd, don’t meet their eyes. Eventually I got them to face me and, as we had practised for Ben Hannable’s sake, recite a timeses table. I was proud of their achievement – not in the recitation, but in persuading him that they enjoyed it, so that he would believe that he was important, influential, and would continue putting oil money into his Foundation.
“That’s summit like!” he said when they had finished. “A penny each for the big boys, a ha’penny for the girls and a farden for the little ’ns.” The class immediately found its voice, particularly the little ’ns, trying to prove that they were big.
“And now you can all clear off home and tell your mothers and fathers that it’s Mister Benjamin Hannable they got to thank. And you can tell them that it’s Mister Hannable what the Lord Chancellor have made a Justice of the Peace.”
He looked triumphantly at me through the scramble for the door, as the class got quickly away before anybody remembered the rule that everything had to be clean and tidy and the fermity put on before they went.
“I should congratulate you then,” I said, as I began to tidy the room.
“Yes, Missie. Magistrate for the County of Hampshire sitting at Blackbrook. You have to own land worth a hundred a year. I had land worth a hundred a year a long time, but they thought I didn’t have the way of talking for a JP. But I tell you, Missie, in the end it’s money that talks and it can talk like a eliman’s son if there’s enough of it.” He sat back, his thumbs in his waistcoat pockets, patting his bow-window with his fingers.
“You must feel very . . . gratified,” I said.
“That’s right, Missie, gratified. And I shall feel even more – gratified – when it comes to the county quarter sessions and they haves to accept me as one of they. They a get used to me: they an’t got no choice. Magistrates is there for life. Stop fiddling about with them things and come and sit here.” He patted the bench beside him. I took the stool on the opposite side of the fireplace.
“And that an’t all, Missie. I set myself up a long time ago to have the king touch my shoulder. Know what I mean, Missie? Sir Benjamin Hannable, JP – Sir Benjamin. And I shall have it. There an’t nothing you can’t have if you got enough money.”
He reached across and patted my knee. I rose and began pouring the fermity wheat into the iron pot. He rose and came very close to me. “Don’t that spark you up, Missie?” He began fingering my hair as though examining fabric. I made a move to side-step him. As I did so he pulled at my hair, undoing the knot. He placed himself in my way. He grabbed my wrist and pulled me towards him. “Don’t nothing spark you up, Missie? Are you too special to turn your nose up at being Lady Hannable?” I had been right. He still harboured resentment about my not accepting him when he had thought that he was doing me an honour in offering marriage. It had become worse than resentment: I could see hatred and vindictiveness in him.
“Let me be!” The skin on my wrist burnt as I wrenched it from his grasp.
“Let her be!”
Rob Netherfield was through the door and across the room before Ben Hannable could take a step back. He thrust my attacker’s arm high up behind his back and propelled him towards the door, knocking over everything in their path. At the door, Rob gave a push and the Lord Chancellor’s new representative tumbled like a tipped milk-churn into Annie Bassett’s filthy yard.
He picked himself up and, his face distorted with malevolence, said, “You’ve had the last penny out of me for your high and mighty scheme, Miss. If you wants a journeyman’s hand up your skirt then it looks like you got somebody to oblige.” He went on in this
vein as he mounted his horse. I was too full of white fury even to blush that Rob should hear. “And you!” he flicked a short riding whip at Rob, who jumped back. “I don’t know who you are, but by God you’d better not find yourself half an inch the wrong side of the law where I am. One pheasant in your pocket and I’ll have you in Austrailee and your feet won’t touch the ground.”
The Sunday before Christmas, I went over to Newton Clare to try to persuade Jaen and Dan to let Hanna come for a few days.
My mother seemed unwell: not so much physically, except for the rheumatics that made her knuckles swell and the bones in her neck crackle. But she no longer did any spinning or spill-making in the evenings. Instead she sat absorbed in the furtive picking and hiding of morsels that she had begun a few months earlier. And the listening. She always appeared to have her head cocked. Sometimes I asked her, “Can you hear somebody coming?” and she would answer as though not wholly in the real world, yet not in a fantasy.
“I thought for a minute it was Will. Or it was Lovey. I thought I heard her calling the banties in. But it might a been a horse. Or perhaps it’s just they old pigeons again. Rob a have to do summit about they, getting in under the eaves. You can’t hear nothing proper when they’m up there rattlin’ off.”
Then she would eye me suspiciously, as though she was not quite sure whether there was something going on that she did not know about.
“You haven’t seen Will lately, have you?”
“No, he’s still up the north.”
“He would come and see me if he came this way?”
I assured her that she would be the first person Will would come to if he ever came south.