‘You’ll never get a clematis to grow like that, not in a month of Sundays!’ Mr Quelch said scornfully, but the clematis flourished and so did everything else she grew.
Often she broke off bits of his shrubs, where they overhung his wall in the lane, and these in due course became small bushes, flowering among the nettles and docks.
‘I’ve no idea what it’s called,’ she would say, when her visitors admired some unusual shrub. ‘You’d better ask Mr Quelch next door. He knows the name of everything.’
She could grow better carrots and onions than he did and to add insult to injury would leave great bunches outside his door. He never got the better of her, but he sometimes took her by surprise. One evening she played her violin and the next morning, over the hedge, asked if the noise had disturbed him.
‘Yes, it did!’ he said to her. ‘You need to tune up on your middle G!’
‘I can’t tune it up. The peg’s got loose.’
‘Let me have it,’ the old man said, ‘and I’ll see what I can do for you.’
Aunt Doe gave him the violin and he fashioned a new peg for her. He cut short her thanks with a wave of his hand.
‘I couldn’t stand that faulty G! But now you can do your worst!’ he said.
Emma’s poem, ‘Autumn Leaves’, came as a surprise to everyone but Betony. It was she who had prompted the child to write it, and it was she who had suggested sending it to the children’s page of The Chepsworth Gazette. It had all begun during a walk, when Emma, treading the dead leaves, suddenly said to Betony: ‘I love the autumn, don’t you?’
‘Why do you love it particularly?’
‘I don’t know. I just do.’
Betony waited patiently. The child sometimes talked when they were alone, but she needed time.
‘It’s because of the smell,’ Emma said. ‘And because of the berries everywhere. All that colour on the trees!’ Then, having glanced behind her as though afraid of being overheard, she said: ‘I’ve got a poem in my head.’
‘Say it to me,’ Betony said.
‘Oh, no, I couldn’t do that. I haven’t thought of the words yet. Only the feeling, that’s all.’
‘Well, write it down when you get home.’
‘I expect it will have gone by then.’
But that night at bed-time, when Betony went in to say goodnight, Emma produced the poem, neatly written on ruled paper, from under her pillow.
Joanna was just a little put out by Emma’s success with this poem of hers. After all, she had once made a serious study of the subject of writing, and she could have given Emma some very valuable advice, if only Emma had bothered to ask.
‘I didn’t want your advice,’ Emma said.
‘No, that’s just it. You always think you know best, my girl.’
‘The writing of a poem,’ Betony said, ‘is rather a private affair, I think.’
But Joanna knew all about such things.
‘I thought of being a writer myself once, only I grew out of that some time ago.’ She wrinkled her nose at Betony. ‘Well, everyone does, don’t they?’ she said.
‘Not quite everyone,’ Betony said, ‘otherwise we should have no books.’
‘With Emma, though, it’s just a phase.’
‘Hark who’s talking!’ Jamesy said.
Joanna was very grown up these days. She knew there were more important things in life than writing novels and poetry. She had earnest discussions with Betony on the subject of God and religious vocation.
All the children called her Betony, though Emma, in the early days, sometimes called her ‘Miss Izzard’ by mistake, and once made the family laugh by putting up her hand, as in the classroom, when she wanted to gain Betony’s attention. The village school had a man in charge now. He was thin and pale and sandy-haired and his name was Mr Toogood.
‘Toogood for what?’ Chris asked.
‘Toogood to be true!’ Jamesy said.
‘Toogood for this world!’ Joanna capped.
The headmaster’s name was a huge joke to them. Emma could never mention school without their laughter breaking over her. Once she suddenly burst into tears, struck at Jamesy with her fists, and ran from the room.
‘Whatever’s the matter with our little Emma, getting into a paddy like that?’ asked Chris.
‘You tease her too much,’ Betony said. ‘You should try listening to her for a change, instead of jeering at everything she says.’
‘She ought to be used to us by now. She ought to know we mean no harm.’
Betony saw, as Aunt Doe had seen, that Emma was being held back.
‘You should give her a chance to grow up.’
But she knew all too well that she wasted her breath. Emma was the baby of the family. She always would be, all her life, and everything she said would always be met with teasing laughter.
Betony got on with all the children. They saw that her interest in them was genuine, and they brought all their troubles to her, as well as their joys. Chris liked to argue with her about politics; the state of the world in general and of agriculture in particular; and the running of the farm.
‘If we were to invest in a single tractor ‒’
‘It would mean a man thrown out of work.’
‘I might have known you’d side with Dad!’
‘Of course,’ said Stephen, joining in. ‘It’s a wife’s duty to side with her husband. Isn’t it in the marriage vows?’ And, alone with Betony, he said once: ‘Am I an old stick-in-the-mud?’
‘Sometimes you are,’ Betony said.
‘When?’ he asked, somewhat piqued.
‘Over this business of the wireless, for instance.’
‘Let’s not have that all over again!’
‘Well, you did ask me,’ Betony said.
‘I should have known better,’ he said with a smile.
He was against the wireless. ‘Noisy spluttering things!’ he said. ‘Why should we want to hear signals from the North Pole?’ Yet when the wireless came into the house at last, he would stand transfixed, listening to it, and make himself late feeding the cows.
‘You may as well sit down to it, Dad.’
‘No, no, I’m just off,’ he would say, and would still be there ten minutes later.
The news coming over the wireless was not too good at that time. Everywhere there was grave unrest. The General Strike was in the offing. There was even fear of civil war.
‘I’m not surprised!’ Betony said. ‘What does the government expect?’
‘It seems as though they expect the worst, judging by the preparations that are going forward.’
‘Then I hope they get it, that’s all.’
‘You don’t mean you hope for civil war?’
‘I hope for something that will make the powers-that-be see sense.’
‘The solutions to our problems don’t grow on trees, I’m afraid.’
‘No, I know,’ Betony said. ‘But the government ‒ and, as Bob Tupper says, there’s not much to choose between one and another ‒ is not looking for solutions in the right place. They are not trying hard enough. That’s why there is so little trust among the working-people of our country.’
And when the General Strike was over, broken by government strategy, she felt that hope and trust among the working-people would not be revived for many a long and bitter day.
One Sunday in May, 1926, Aunt Doe fell off her bicycle, on her way home from church. Mr Quelch found her lying in the road and she was taken to hospital.
‘The fuss that man makes, you’d never believe! No doubt he hopes I shall be laid up. But there’s nothing whatever the matter with me. Not so much as a scratch anywhere.’
But there was something wrong with Aunt Doe. She had thrombosis in both legs. The doctors advised amputation.
Sitting up in her hospital bed, she told Betony how she had overheard the two specialists talking, only a couple of paces away.
‘ “That right leg will have to come off,” I heard one of the
so-and-so’s say. “Probably the other as well.” So I drew my curtain and said to him: “That’s my leg you’re talking about, young man, and I’ll say whether it’s to come off or not!” ’
Betony was deeply moved by the old lady’s fortitude. It was a moment before she could speak and even then she could not match Aunt Doe’s composure.
‘Will you take their advice?’
‘I haven’t decided yet. I’m keeping the blighters in suspense!’
In the end, a few days later, she decided against the amputation.
‘I think I prefer to take my chance.’
While she was still in hospital, she received a visit from Mr Quelch. He sat on the edge of the visitors’ chair and tried to make her change her mind.
‘A wheelchair wouldn’t be so bad. I could easily wheel you about.’
‘Up and down that steep hill? Don’t be ridiculous, Mr Quelch!’
‘You’ll die if you don’t let them amputate.’
‘I shall die anyway,’ Aunt Doe said. ‘The only difference between you and me is that I have an inkling of when I shall go. But dead or alive, I’m keeping my legs!’
So she went home to her little cottage and lived a perfectly normal life. She rode her bicycle to church; dug her garden and mowed her grass; and sowed her rows of wallflower seeds, for filling her borders the following year. Then one day she collapsed and died. Mr Quelch went in, and she lay on the floor. He fetched Stephen immediately.
‘Stubborn to the last, that cousin of yours! Why couldn’t she listen to good advice? I’d have looked after her, silly old trout!’
There were tears in the old man’s eyes, and after the funeral, when the grave had been filled in, he planted a few ‘slips’ from her favourite rose. It was the wrong time of year of course.
‘But I daresay they’ll grow ‒ for her,’ he said.
That was the middle of July. Soon the oats were ripening palely in the Freelands at Holland Farm and the men were heard sharpening their scythes. They missed Aunt Doe at harvest-time, leading the way out to the field, with her long mannish stride and her heavy shoes and her dark blue straw hat tied over her head. They missed her at every family gathering, and remembered her always, at every turn, even when her name was not actually mentioned. If anyone left a morsel of food on a plate, someone else was sure to say: ‘The people in Calcutta would be glad of that!’ and if anyone expressed too nice a fastidiousness, someone else was sure to say: ‘I’ve seen worse that that in Ranjiloor!’
Among the treasures Aunt Doe left, there was a dressing-box, which went to Emma, a Ghurka’s knife, which went to Chris, and a piece of ivory scrimshaw, which went to Jamesy. She left Joanna her violin. And each of the children received a hundred and fifty pounds.
Joanna was almost seventeen. She would soon be leaving school, but had not yet decided on a career. Having flirted in the past with music, writing, medicine, and religious work, she had now discarded them all and so far nothing had taken their place. She talked about it to the family.
‘I want to do something ‒ Oh I don’t know ‒’ And, in despair at expressing herself, Joanna flung her arms out wide. ‘Something different!’ she exclaimed.
‘You could be a lady balloonist,’ said Chris.
‘Or go as a missionary to the Isle of Wight,’ said Jamesy.
‘What about charming snakes in the market-place at Chepsworth?’
‘Or deep-sea diving for pearls at Land’s End?’
The boys were full of frivolous suggestions. They came up with something new every day. But when Joanna knew about Aunt Doe’s legacy, she decided to spend it in travelling through Europe for three months with her school-friend, Elaine. Elaine was going with her parents and they had invited Joanna to join them.
‘You don’t mind if I spend Aunt Doe’s money like that?’
‘Of course I don’t,’ Stephen said. ‘You can spend it as you please.’
‘When I come back,’ Joanna said, ‘I shall know what work I want to do.’
The older children were growing up. Only Emma remained a child. She was doing well at the village school and would probably win a scholarship to the girls’ grammar school in Chepsworth in due course.
‘You’ll be going to Lock’s,’ Betony said. ‘I went there, after leaving Huntlip. You’ll like it, I’m sure.’
‘What shall I do afterwards?’
‘What do you think you want to do?’
‘Wanting’s no use,’ Emma said. ‘That doesn’t get you anywhere.’
Emma wanted a great many things. She wanted passionately to be able to draw, like Jamesy; to play the piano, like Joanna; to have fair hair like Betony’s; to save Mr Toogood from a terrible fire. Often she wished she were somebody else: Flora Macdonald or Edith Cavell; St Teresa or Joan of Arc; Maggie Tulliver or Becky Sharp. She would practise being cold and impassive, denying herself her favourite foods. Then she would switch to the opposite, saying clever, wounding things and snatching the best cake from the dish. She would change her character every few days, almost as often as she changed her frock. She would try something new and cast it aside.
‘Emma, my child, just be yourself!’ Stephen said once, in exasperation.
But Betony knew that for some children, and Emma was one, it was difficult to know what that ‘self’ was. She had to find it. She had to explore.
‘I wonder,’ she said to Betony once: ‘I wonder what it’s like to be really wicked.’
‘I hope you’re not going to try it out.’
‘No, I’m putting it into a poem instead.’
Sometimes the whole family spent a Sunday at Cobbs. The two boys enjoyed the carpenter’s shop. Sometimes Betony went alone, on a week-day, perhaps; but however frequently she went, her father’s greeting was always the same. ‘Hello, my blossom. You’re quite a stranger nowadays.’ She had always been his favourite child, and although he was happy to see her married, he missed her sorely at every turn.
‘I seen Jack Mercybright last week. He was driving some sheep along the road, out not far from Capleton Wick.’
‘Where are they living? Did he say?’
‘Somewhere near Oakshott, seemingly.’
‘Nothing more precise than that?’
‘I did ask him where, but you know what he is. Strikes me he don’t never want us to know.’
Betony felt that this was true. She had tried often to track them down, but always, by the time she had word of them, they had moved to another place. She worried about Linn and the little boy. She thought of her dead foster brother, Tom Maddox, whose child Robert was, and she felt that she had let him down.
‘But what can we do,’ her father said, ‘when they make it so plain that they don’t want no help from none of us?’
‘We can go on trying,’ Betony said.
The recession was worsening with each year that passed, and the signs of it were everywhere. A great many men, tramping the roads, travelling from one ‘spike’ to the next, called at the farm in search of work. Betony always gave them food and a shilling, perhaps, to set them on their way, just as Aunt Doe had always done, and she listened to what they had to say. Once Stephen came into the house just as a man was walking away.
‘That man went right through the war,’ she said. ‘He’s a skilled toolmaker out of a job. He hasn’t worked for nearly three years. A land fit for heroes? It makes me ashamed!’
The children of the village itself: sometimes she saw them in the fields, pulling a few turnip-tops or a few leaves of kale, on their way home from school: ragged, ill-shod, all skin and bone, especially those whose fathers had no work. She was on good terms with Mr Toogood, the headmaster, and sometimes she called on him and his wife.
‘Some of these children come to school without any breakfast but a cup of tea. They have a slice of bread and margarine at dinner-time and they go home to God-knows-what in the way of supper.’
‘Yes, I know,’ Betony said.
She still sent baskets of apples to the
school every autumn, and whenever the weather was hard in wintertime, she sent a copper can full of hot baked potatoes every day till the weather improved. Mr Toogood gave them out the moment they arrived, and the children devoured them, skins and all. But one angry mother stormed into the school and railed at him for giving her Ernie ‘charity’.
‘What did you say to her?’ Betony asked.
‘I said this was one decision Ernie was entitled to make for himself.’
One evening in the spring of 1928, Betony and Stephen walked in the fields above the farmhouse. From the top of the hill, as they looked down over their own land and that of their neighbours round about: on bright green corn and darker pasture; cattle and pigs and flocks of sheep; with plum orchards in blossom here and there: England looked a land of plenty.
‘And so it should be,’ Betony said, ‘if only things were properly run.’
‘I don’t see much change in the offing yet. Not for a year or two anyway. Perhaps the thirties will be better.’
‘Perhaps we need to do something to try and make them better.’
‘What can we do?’
‘I don’t know. I wish I did.’
Stephen gave a little laugh. He drew her arm into his.
‘You want to take the whole world and turn it upside down,’ he said.
‘I want to turn it the right way up.’
The evening was fine. The air smelt of greenness and freshness and life. There was a gentleness in the wind. They walked together, arm in arm, enjoying the softness of the evening. In the home pasture, next to the house, the mare, Thistle, was showing off with her new foal. In the meadow known as Long Gains, the shepherd was going the round of his flocks, for lambing time was close at hand. Life at Holland Farm was fair. Of the world beyond ‒ what of that? It would be easy, Betony felt, to shut it out and forget about it.
‘There ought to be something we can do.’
One Saturday morning in May, Challoner called in his motor car, on his way in to town. He returned a shotgun he had borrowed. He and Stephen stood in the yard, and all the time as Challoner talked his gaze was following Betony as she went to and fro, feeding the hens. When she went indoors, he spoke of her.
‘You did a good thing when you married that girl. It’s given her something to do with herself, instead of poking her nose into men’s affairs and stirring things up, as she used to do. A woman’s place is in the home.’
The Land Endures (The Apple Tree Saga Book 4) Page 26