Downstairs, in the bedroom she shared with Joanna, Emma stood in front of the wardrobe, looking at herself in the long mirror. She wore a black silk band on her arm and a tiny tin watch, taken from a Christmas cracker, pinned to the bosom of her frock. She folded her hands in front of her and bowed her head.
‘Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, O Lord, and by thy great mercy defend us from all perils and dangers of this night …’
Below, in the hall, a door closed and Aunt Doe’s voice called up the stairs. Emma pulled the black band from her arm and threw it into an open drawer. She unpinned the watch and set it aside.
‘Emma, where are you?’ Aunt Doe called. ‘I’ve got a little job for you.’
‘All right, I’m coming!’ Emma replied.
New Year’s Eve was cold and wet. All day at the farm, fires burnt in the sitting-room and dining-room, and the children were busy with their preparations. With the connecting doors removed, the two rooms became one, and when all the inessential furniture had been removed, there was space enough for six rows of chairs. The ‘stage,’ at one end, consisted of two shearing-platforms, and drawstring curtains hung in front from a wire fixed to a beam in the ceiling. At the back of the room, behind the rows of seats, a trestle table had been set up, covered with a clean white sheet, and by seven o’clock in the evening Aunt Doe, with Mrs Bessemer’s help, had filled the table with all sorts of food.
At seven o’clock, the farm-hands arrived with their wives and children, all dressed in their best clothes. Only Morton George stayed away and, as Chris remarked, who cared about him? The vicar was there with his wife and daughter; Agnes Mayle was there with three of her younger brothers and sisters; so were some friends of Aunt Doe’s from the Women’s Institute; and a few of the neighbouring farmers came, including John Challoner and his son Gerald.
Aunt Doe, in a brown woollen dress, ran to and fro without pause, showing people to their seats and going ‘backstage’ now and then to help the actors with their costumes, their lines, and their last-minute nerves.
‘My gosh!’ said Jamesy, having peeped through the curtains at the audience. ‘There’s no end of a crowd! Where the deuce is my three-cornered hat?’
Chris had no nerves. Although in a state of some excitement, he was in command of himself. He was even brave enough to walk out into the hall, wearing his costume, to welcome Betony when she arrived.
‘I’m so glad you could come, Miss Izzard, and after my behaviour at the meeting that time, I think it is more than I deserve.’
His welcoming speech was well-rehearsed. He had spent some days perfecting it. And, dressed as he was in his best fawn breeches and the ‘cutaway’ coat Aunt Doe had made him, with white lace ruffles at throat and wrists, he delivered his lines with a certain panache. But his smile and his look were genuine enough and Betony responded to them.
‘I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.’
‘It’s only a bit of a lark, you know. It’s something Joanna and Jamesy dreamt up and I got roped in to give them a hand.’
He took her coat and hat and hung them up. He ushered her in to a seat at the front, specially reserved with her name on it. He treated her as the guest of honour.
‘I’m afraid I shall have to leave you now, but you will excuse me, won’t you?’ he said.
He walked away down the side of the room and there was a little round of applause from the Holland Farm men and their families before he vanished behind the curtains. Betony, turning in her seat, looked round at the rest of the audience. They were all known to her, especially the children, and she exchanged greetings with them. When she turned back again, she found Emma sitting beside her.
‘Aren’t you going to be in the play?’
Emma said nothing, but shook her head.
‘Oh, well, never mind. I expect you’d sooner watch, like me.’
A voice called out and the lights were dimmed. The audience stopped talking and applauded instead. The curtains parted to reveal the stage, lit by a single hurricane lamp, carried by Jamesy as the villainous pirate, clad in striped pyjama trousers, a shirt painted with the skull and crossbones, and a scarlet bandana round his head.
‘Easy does it, you lubberly rogues!’ he snarled to an imaginary crew behind. ‘Belay there and hold your noise! Easy on the tiller, you fool! Now! ‒ Fire a shot across her bows!’
Stephen, outside the sitting-room window, set off a charge of gunpowder in an old iron stovepipe to simulate the cannon’s roar. He was then able to go indoors and take his place at the back of the audience, glad of the room’s enveloping warmth after the wind and rain outside. He could see Betony, six rows in front, sitting next to his youngest daughter.
All through rehearsals, Chris had taken the play very seriously, and had often been vexed by Joanna’s carelessness with her lines. But now, tonight, there was a change. Aware of the audience watching him, he suddenly saw the play for what it was, and an imp of mischief got into him.
‘A goodly looking youth ‒’ Joanna cried, remembering to project her voice; and Chris, who should have lain still, being unconscious, gave a little modest cough and put up a hand to straighten his cravat; ‘‒ but reeks of garlic!’ Joanna said, reproving him with a sharp kick.
Chris however was unrepentant and when, later on in the same act, his part required that he should lift Joanna into his arms, he deliberately allowed his knees to buckle and staggered with her across the stage.
‘Fear not, my love! You are but a sylph!’ he gasped. ‘I could carry you to the end of the world!’
The audience responded with a cheer. The play was giving them a good many laughs. And when Chris, setting Joanna down at last, knocked over the ‘ship’s table’ and it was seen to be a box stencilled with the words ‘Hardy and Hawker’s Binder Twine’, there was another loud cheer. Joanna by now was furiously angry. She set the box upright again, with the treacherous words hidden from sight.
Exits and entrances were through a door to the right of the stage. In the last act, due to a shortage of actors, Aunt Doe made a brief appearance as one of the pirate crew. Wearing a scarf tied over her head and a black patch over one eye, she opened the door with such force that Jamesy’s cutlass was knocked from his hand. She fixed him with her one ferocious staring eye and delivered her only line in the play.
‘What orders, Captain?’
Her voice was immense. It took the principals by surprise. Chris and Jamesy got the giggles and Jamesy for a while was quite unable to answer her.
‘What orders, I say?’ Aunt Doe bellowed.
‘H-hoist the mains’l!’ Jamesy said.
‘Splice the main-brace and batten the hatches!’ Chris shouted, carried away. ‘Weigh anchor and man the oars!’
These lines were not in the written play. Nor were many of the others that flew across the stage in the next few minutes. But the story moved to its appointed end and the wicked pirate met his desserts.
‘See where he hangs from yonder yard-arm!’ And Chris pointed to where poor Jamesy, hooked to a rope hanging from the rafters, was brandishing a puny fist. ‘England is safe from one black-hearted villain at least!’
‘Let me down!’ Jamesy piped, forgetting to pitch his voice to a growl. ‘Let me down, you mutinous swabs, or I’ll have you keel-hauled, every man jack of you!’
‘I am the captain now!’ Chris declared. He danced a hornpipe, whistling the tune. He at least was enjoying himself, but Joanna, crimson in the face, looked as though she could murder him. ‘The skull and crossbones fly no more from yonder masthead! Instead I have hoisted the flag of St George! We sail for England ‒ and Holland Farm ‒ where this fair maid shall be my bride!’
‘Stop it, you’re spoiling everything!’ Joanna hissed. Chris merely took her into his arms. Reverently he kissed her cheek.
‘Are you happy, my Lady Rosina?’
Joanna’s answer was inaudible. Secretly she was pinching him, twisting the flesh at the back of his neck. He bore it bravely and
kissed her again.
‘What did you say, my shyest one?’
This time her answer was audible, but only to him, and he, with the greatest aplomb in the world, turned to face his audience.
‘She’s blissfully happy and I’m standing on her foot!’ There was loud applause from the audience, and a great deal of stamping of feet. The stage curtains began to close but became stuck half way across. Aunt Doe, still in her eye-patch and bandana, tugged at the drawstrings and broke them off. She went and closed the curtains by hand, swearing at them in Hindustani.
‘I suppose,’ said Bob Tupper, enjoying a plateful of cold ham and pickles, ‘our young master here will be going on the films next.’
‘Tomorrow morning,’ Chris said, ‘I shall be out with you in the Bratch, making a start on that sugar-beet.’
‘What, in them clothes?’ said Billy Rye.
Chris was still wearing his stage costume. He grinned at the men and moved away. Joanna and Jamesy, with their father, were standing talking to the vicar.
‘I’d no idea your children had such a comic talent, Wayman.’
‘Neither had I,’ Stephen said.
‘As for the beautiful heroine ‒’
‘When I’ve got time,’ Joanna said, ‘I intend to write a proper play.’
Emma had a plate of hot mince-pies and was offering them to Betony. But Betony’s plate was already filled with sausage-rolls and sandwiches. She was talking to Mrs Billy Rye. She smiled at Emma, and the child went away. Chris, too, was hovering. Mrs Rye gave way to him. He carried a bottle of ginger wine and he refilled Betony’s glass.
‘At least the food and drink are all right, Miss Izzard, even if the play was not up to much.’
‘The play went down very well,’ she said, ‘and now the food is doing the same.’
She rather liked this boy of fifteen. Tonight he was gay and debonair; the occasion had filled him with ebullience; but underneath this evening’s mood, she thought, there was seriousness of purpose and great resolution. He would not be slow in growing to manhood.
‘The idea was to cheer everyone up a bit. Things are rather gloomy on the land just now.’
‘And elsewhere.’
‘Do you think the new government will mend matters, Miss Izzard?’
‘I’m not a crystal-gazer, I’m afraid. All I can do is hope for the best.’
Chris was called away by John Challoner. He excused himself with great politeness. Betony, still with her plate in her hand, went to speak to a group of children, gathered where the table was most full of food. She saw that two of the Starling boys were cramming their pockets with apples and nuts. She spoke to them and they put the things back. She returned to where she had left her glass.
From across the room Stephen watched her, although he was talking to Arnold Twill. A little while later he came to her. The hubbub around them was very loud. He had to speak up to make himself heard.
‘It was kind of you to come, especially on such a bitter night. Can I get you another drink?’
‘Thank you, no, I’ve got plenty.’
‘I was sorry to hear of your great-grandfather’s death. I only met him once or twice, but I knew his reputation as a craftsman, and as a man of forceful character.’
Betony smiled.
‘You will hear people say that he was a hard, unyielding man, and there is truth in what they say, but a piece of old Huntlip has died with him, I think, and perhaps a piece of old Worcestershire.’
‘Do you regret its passing?’ he asked.
‘Most things take on a special colour, once they are in the past,’ she said.
‘Will the present bad times do the same, do you think, when we look back on them in years to come?’
‘It depends how long the bad times last.’
‘Let’s drink to the future, anyway,’ he said, and raised his glass. ‘I wish you good health, Miss Izzard, and a happy new year.’
‘A happy new year!’ Betony said.
When she left Holland Farm it was close upon midnight, and by the time she got home to Cobbs the hour had struck. It was 1924.
The following morning, Chris started work on the sugar-beet, in the fifteen acres known as the Bratch. He worked with Starling and Morton George, Harry Ratchet and Billy Rye, and cold wet dirty work it was too. The sugar-beet, loosened in the ground by the plough, had to be pulled up by hand and knocked together to shed the soil. The green tops were then cut off and the beets were thrown into the waggon. But the beets were too wet to shed the soil. Icy cold and covered with slime, they stung the men’s hands until they ached. And the language heard in the field that day sometimes reddened Chris’s ears.
Once Stephen came into the field and took a turn at lifting and topping. But with his badly twisted fingers he was less deft than the other men, and after an hour his hand was useless, the fingers seized up in a painful cramp. He threw down his bill-hook and walked away, and as soon as he was out of earshot, Morton George gave a grunt.
‘That’s a great help, I must say, his doing that! How many beets did he throw in? We should get on famously if we all done as much as the master done!’
Chris, though angry on his father’s behalf, went on with his work and said nothing. Morton George was beneath his contempt. Chris never spoke to him if he could help it.
At Outlands, when they lifted their beet, it was left in great mounds beside the road, to await collection by motor lorry. Chris thought this a grand idea. He wanted his father to do the same. But Stephen wouldn’t hear of it. Each load must go to the factory as soon as lifted.
‘Hang it all!’ Chris protested. ‘Think of the time we should save.’
‘No,’ Stephen said, ‘I want that beet taken in straight away.’
Three days later the hard frosts came. Chris was at Outlands on an errand one day and Gerald showed him their sugar-beet crop, heaped by the roadside, ready to be taken to the factory. Gerald kicked at it savagely. The rotten pulp was all over his boots and the sweetish carroty smell of it was very strong on the frosty air.
‘So much for the Ministry’s precious beet! I’m damned if we’ll grow that stuff again!’
‘You should’ve carted it straight away, the same as we did,’ Chris said.
He did not often get a chance to score off Gerald. He went home whistling up the hill.
There was a friendly rivalry between the two boys as they went about their work on the two farms. If they met at the boundary, they would stop for a chat. But Chris was much less in Gerald’s company these days, and much less inclined to repeat his opinions. Stephen noted it and was glad.
In the middle of January there was a heavy fall of snow. Then the rain came again and washed it away. It was bitterly cold on high ground, and in the valleys there were floods.
At the village school, children who came from outlying places arrived soaked and shivering. Their faces were pinched, their hands and feet numb. At such times as these, Betony set routine aside. Coats and shoes were put to dry; forms were drawn up around the stoves; and the children sat as close as they could, steaming dry in the heat of the fires and drinking the cocoa that Betony had heated for them on the hob.
The first lessons of the day were taken round the stove, but instead of following the timetable, the children were encouraged to talk about the terrible weather and the things they had seen on their way to school. In the smaller room, Miss Vernon did the same with her younger ones, who soon lost their shyness as the game went on.
‘I seen one of Mr Franklin’s turkeys swimming for his life when I came by. The brook was up as far as his barn.’
‘I seen a dog with a fish in his mouth, running along Withy Lane.’
‘Old Mrs Tarpin at Collow Ford, she’d got a great mattress in front of her door, to stop the water getting in. But it got in all right. She was upstairs hollering at the window and the blacksmith was reaching her up her milk.’
All the children had something to tell, even the ‘babies’ of three and fo
ur. Only Emma Wayman remained silent.
‘Well, Emma, and what about you?’ Miss Vernon said cheerfully. ‘What did you see on the way to school?’
‘I didn’t see anything,’ Emma said.
Rain continued all day, and Betony decided to cut the afternoon short, but already, at two o’clock, word was coming in that the Derrent brook had burst its banks and had flooded the road at Slings Dip. Eighteen children used that road and Betony went down with them to see for herself how matters stood. Sure enough, the road was impassable for two hundred yards or more, the water being a good two feet deep. She was herding the children back to the school when a cart came down from Holland Lane and drew up beside her. Stephen Wayman leapt to the ground.
‘Tupper told me the road was flooded. I thought maybe you might need help.’
‘Indeed we do!’ Betony said. ‘These children would have a three mile walk if they had to go round by Lippy Hill.’
Stephen wasted no time. He began lifting the children into the cart, and Betony helped him. The bigger ones clambered in by themselves. There was a lot of laughter among them as the cart, creaking, began to move. Their journey through the swirling waters became a mighty joke indeed. The mare, Phoebe, splashed her way through and, reaching the unflooded ground beyond, gave vent to a thankful whinny. The children, once they had been set down in safety, stood watching as Stephen, with some difficulty, turned the horse and cart in the road. They watched it make its return journey, then they scampered off towards home, some to Steadworth and some to Bounds.
Betony stood outside the school gate. Stephen stopped to speak to her.
‘Is that the lot living out that way?’
‘Yes. And I can’t tell you how grateful I am.’
The rain had stopped for a little while, but the gale still blew ferociously, whipping the words from Betony’s lips. She had to lean forward into the wind to keep her balance against its buffets. She had to hold on to the skirts of her coat to keep them wrapped close about her legs.
‘What weather!’ she said, looking up at him, and she laughed because of the rollicking wind that threatened to knock her off her feet.
The Land Endures (The Apple Tree Saga Book 4) Page 18