All Among the Barley Read online

  What’s missing from the tale, though, is Mother. John must have walked across-country from the railway station at Market Stoundham to go straight to the horses in the fields; and if they were in the fields and Father at the farm, Mother must have been working them, for as the daughter of a horseman that’s what she did in the long War years. So, unlike Mary, when I picture the end of the War I picture something I didn’t see and cannot fully imagine: John in his filthy uniform stumbling over thick winter clods to where my mother guides the plough behind the straining team; then, as she sees him approaching and halts the horses, something is said between them that however hard I try, I cannot hear.

  II

  Constance FitzAllen arrived at Wych Farm five months later, on a bright red bicycle. It was a June day, dry and warm, and we were haymaking.

  Ours was the first of the farms in the valley to cut our hay each year. We usually began on the sixth of June, unless of course it was a Sunday; Grandfather held that the first week in June was always dry. At one time Hullets, with more south-facing land than us, had cut three days before, but now the house, orchard and outbuildings stood abandoned, the roof of the old black-timbered barn half falling in.

  Our little Fordson had come from Hullets; John said the farmer there had bought it brand new with the money they got when their horses were sent to the Front. Apart from a brief trial, though, we didn’t much use it, for our land was too heavy and petrol too dear. Like most small farmers in the district, we cut our hay with a horse-drawn mower, as we had since the olden days when men scythed the fields by hand. We had a spring-tined harrow for breaking up clods, a broadcast sower, and a red Albion reaper-binder we relied upon at harvest-time, all of them horse-drawn; Father had bought them just after the War, believing, as many had, that prices would stay high.

  I wasn’t allowed to help ready the mower with its long sickle-bar blade, nor to walk too close to it while it worked. Instead I had been tasked with looking after the whetstone, lest it fall out of John’s pocket on the jouncing iron seat, and at his shout running to shoo away any birds, like partridges or larks, that were brooding eggs in the long grass and wouldn’t stir. Only the previous day we’d found the nest of a landrail with three deep-blotched eggs; John had said the mother bird wouldn’t return, they never did, and so I’d picked them up gently and slipped them under one of our hens to brood.

  I first laid eyes on Constance as we turned at the headland; she had leant her bicycle up against the gate and was sitting on its top bar. She wore loose trousers held in by bicycle clips at the ankles, a man’s shirt, sleeves rolled, and no hat; she held up a hand to shield her eyes from the morning sun, and she was smiling. It was all so long ago now; yet I will never forget the sight of her there.

  John saw her at the same moment I did; I could tell by the set of his back, although he gave no sign. Moses and Malachi walked steadily on, the mower whirring, the sweet scent of cut grass rising all around. As we neared the gate she jumped down, and I wondered if she and John knew one another; but it was my name, not John’s, that she called.

  ‘Edith – it is Edith, isn’t it? How d’you do – I’m Constance FitzAllen. I was told you were making hay.’

  I remember thinking how tall she was: quite the tallest woman I had ever met. She stuck out a hand, and after a moment I took it; it was larger than mine and strong, like Frank’s but without Frank’s calluses. My own hand was hot and damp and I wished I had thought to wipe it on my skirt. She was still smiling.

  ‘I heard in the village that you’d started, and I bicycled straight over,’ she said. ‘I promise I won’t get in your way.’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ I said idiotically, although I hadn’t the least idea what she meant. John had turned the horses and was heading away from us up the meadow; I hoped he wouldn’t break a mower blade on a flint, or put up a bird. I couldn’t see Frank anywhere; I presumed he was opening up the next field by hand, or perhaps had gone back to see to the pigs. Our sow was not far off farrowing.

  ‘So that’s John,’ Constance said, shielding her eyes again. ‘John of the horse magic. How marvellous! You must introduce me.’

  ‘He’s . . . he won’t like being disturbed,’ I managed.

  ‘Of course! Of course – I don’t mean now. This evening, perhaps, or tomorrow. There’s plenty of time. May I leave my bicycle here, or will it be in the way? Thank you. So tell me, Edith: you’ve just finished with school; won’t you miss it?’

  I shook my head. I knew that when September came I would be sorry not to see Miss Carter, who had lent me books from her own home, but generally it was a relief not to have to go back to school. I had no especial friends to miss; the other children all knew that I was clever, and coupled with my lack of skill at playground games it meant that I was at best ignored, at worst disliked. This was something I tried very hard not to mind, telling myself that I preferred my own company, but if truth be told it never ceased to smart. Sometimes, when I was younger, I would imagine I had secret powers and pretend to curse the other children, visiting boils and sickness on them with a glance.

  I nearly died of diphtheria when I was four, spending weeks in bed with nothing, not even books, to overexcite me, and Mother always held that after that I was a very different child. She believed my illness had left me with a weak constitution, so that at school I wasn’t allowed to play rough games or run about. Instead I remained in the classroom at playtime, reading, or walked around the schoolyard by myself if I wanted some fresh air. Being the youngest child at home, and us not having any near neighbours, as the people in the village did, I grew up used to my own company, I suppose.

  Constance had begun to walk slowly along the field margin, and I followed; I felt that I must know her but had forgotten, or perhaps Mother had told me about her coming and I hadn’t taken it in. How did she know me, and what on earth did she want?

  ‘So what’s next – further study, perhaps? I hear you’re quite the scholar.’ She picked a pink dog-rose from the hedge and sniffed it, then began to twirl it quickly and deftly between her fingers, first one way, and then the other, until it was a blur.

  ‘Miss Carter – my teacher, that is – she wanted me to train to be a teacher. But Father says I’m needed at home for now.’

  ‘Ah, of course, of course. Anyway, I’ve put up in the village – Elmbourne,’ she said airily, and as if it needed to be explained. ‘I thought a month, but perhaps longer. Everyone’s been so welcoming, although I must say my lodgings are a little . . . austere.’

  ‘At the inn?’ I said. The Bell & Hare was the only place I knew of that let rooms – mostly to commercial travellers, though it wasn’t entirely impossible, I supposed, that someone should come for a holiday. A woman in britches on her own, though? How the village would talk.

  ‘Oh no – I’m boarding at the draper’s for now, with a widow, a Mrs Eleigh.’ It was as though she had read my mind. ‘I wrote ahead; it’s all very proper. We shall see, though. It may not suit me. She may not suit.’

  She turned and really grinned at me then, and I was dazzled; I smiled back at her, I couldn’t help it.

  ‘Why are you here?’ I blurted out, and felt myself blush. ‘I’m – I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be rude –’

  She just laughed. ‘Oh! Not at all. It’s I who should apologise, Edith; in the last few days I’ve grown so used to the people in the village knowing my business that I presumed the news would have travelled here – such as it is. I’m making a study of country ways: folklore, cottage crafts, dialect words, recipes – that kind of thing. The War – well, that’s when everything began to change, don’t you agree? And it’s such a dreadful shame to see it all being forgotten. So I mean to preserve it – or some of it, at least – for future generations. We simply must celebrate places like this.’

  I stored that away to think about later. It was the first time I had ever heard anyone talk like that; the first time, I suppose, that I had glimpsed my little world from the outside: as some
thing worthy of note, and subject to change. It unsettled me, but there was something else about it too, something interesting; and I liked being addressed as though I were a grown-up, too. It hadn’t happened to me before.

  ‘Do you mean – are you writing a book? You’re an author?’

  ‘Oh no. Well, I’d like to think I might be, one day.’ She had turned almost coquettish, which made me oddly uncomfortable. ‘I’ve had a little sketch in Blackwood’s and interest from one of the weekly magazines. One day, yes, a book of some kind, if it can be managed. And not one of these elegies for a lost world, either! No, the English are already far too much in love with the past. Something more practical, something that makes a difference – we must remake the country entirely, I feel; set it back on the right course. Don’t you agree?’

  John was turning the horses again; the sun glinted off their head brasses, and I heard him curse as a partridge exploded clucking and flapping from under Moses’ hooves.

  ‘Anyway, that’s why I’m here – to learn all your secrets!’

  She linked her arm through mine and squeezed, and I saw that the dog-rose she had plucked had lost two of its five pink petals.

  ‘Now, tell me all about haymaking,’ she said.

  I loved our two meadows, Great Ley and Middle Ley, and I was always half sorry when they were cut. In April and May the grass grew tall and was thick with buttercups and sorrel and jack-go-to-bed-at-noon; later in the year they were alive with butterflies, snakes and grasshoppers, and starred on August nights with the tiny green lights of glow-worms. We never manured them, yet they were so rich, so reliable, that we would sometimes take a second cut of hay in September, depending on the weather and how much new grass had grown.

  It was wonderful, of course, to see the tall rick safely made, and to know that John would cut slabs of sweet-smelling fodder from it even in the depths of winter. But the meadows looked so bald and bare when at last the long windrows of grass had been turned and cocked and then carted away. I wished each year, when the grass was tall, that we could somehow let them be.

  Of course, it was a silly thing to wish for – I understood that. Far from being a paradise, the unmown meadows at Hullets were thick with thistles and hogweed as tall as a man, while brambles and scrub stole further into them every year. Owls and kestrels hunted them, and the paths of foxes and badgers burrowed through the tangled grass, but even to children like me and Frank the meadows had quickly become almost impassable. Hullets was proof that nature needed husbandry; that if it wasn’t put to work, it went to ruin.

  ‘Land is like a woman, John,’ I’d heard Father say once. ‘You may love her, but she must produce; it does her no good to be idle.’

  I could remember Hullets the very first year it was empty. I can only have been seven or eight, I suppose, and although I knew little of the family who farmed it, or why they were suddenly gone, I had grasped that their meadows would not be mown and I could not keep away. In the weeks after ours had been cut, until school began again, I would run there and lie in the tall grass with its feathery seed-heads and read Little Black Sambo, or Bevis, which was missing its binding, or Frank’s copy of Treasure Island, until my shins and elbows itched where the grass pressed in. At last I would hear Mother calling me in exasperation, but it has always been my habit never to close a book unless I have reached a sentence of seven words exactly in case something dreadful should happen to the farm, or to my family; so I would delay, and often go home to a hiding, because we were expected to work in the fields when we weren’t at school and not to waste time reading books. Yet the following afternoon I would be back in the meadows again, glorying in their luxurious, uncut wildness, my tasks neglected; I couldn’t help it, somehow.

  ‘I’ve a mind to mow ’em myself,’ Father muttered, more than once. ‘We could do with the feed.’

  ‘George, you can’t,’ said Mother. ‘What if it’s sold? That hay isn’t yours to take, you know that.’

  But Hullets didn’t sell, and although after that first year Father stopped eyeing the land, we none of us quite grew accustomed to it lying unused.

  I walked with Constance to the top of Great Ley, where a deep hedge of oaks and field maple separated it from the cornfields, and from Hullets further on. It was full of the wheezing demands of newly fledged birds, the sky above us a hard blue vault where larks invisibly sang; perspiration beaded my forehead, although Constance seemed barely to feel the heat. The mower whirred in the distance, its sound rising and falling not with the breeze, for there was none, but with its changing distance from us. I touched the whetstone in the pocket of my skirt, feeling its roughness against the sensitive tips of my fingers and my badly bitten nails.

  Constance asked me questions, and I answered; but all the while my mind was turning over the simple fact of this strange woman, here on the farm, and trying to understand what it meant. Would she be here all summer? Every day? What would Father and Mother think about it? And for that matter, what did I?

  ‘I suppose it’s the grain harvest that’s the main thing, rather than the hay,’ she mused at the headland. ‘Such a shame the old traditions are passing away, like choosing a harvest lord. Do you still “cry the neck”?’

  ‘Cry the neck?’

  ‘Yes – the neck, or the knack. When the last sheaf is cut. Isn’t that right?’

  I tried to think; already, I found, I didn’t want to disappoint her. More than that, I wanted her to like me, and I felt from her ready smile as though perhaps she might.

  ‘I – I don’t know; I don’t think so. I can ask John; perhaps he’ll know what you mean. Or Grandfather.’

  ‘Oh! Does your grandfather live here on the farm with you, Edith?’

  ‘Oh yes – Father’s father. Didn’t you meet him at the house?’

  ‘Gosh, I had no idea. No, I met your mother, but she didn’t ask me in. There was a colourful old character sweeping the yard – that can’t have been him, though?’

  ‘Oh no, that’ll be Doble. We’ve had him forever.’

  ‘Your foreman?’

  ‘No – he’s just yardman now. His son, Tipper, was foreman, but he died in the War. John saw him get blown up,’ I said, unnecessarily.

  The War was a somewhat hazy idea to me, it all having happened before I was even born and Father having been excused on account of being a farmer – but despite John never speaking of it to us children we had somehow got hold of that one detail, and it fascinated us far more than it should. Really it was a kindness of my father to allow old Doble to resume work after Tipper’s death; there were plenty of young, healthy men who would have taken his place, and been glad of the cottage, too, which was tied. But there had long been Dobles at Wych Farm, just as there had long been Mathers, and Lyttletons at Ixham Hall to whom we paid rent. It was the way of things.

  ‘He’s a wonderful example – Doble, I mean. Positively an archetype, in those antique clothes – I do believe his trousers were actually knotted at the ankle with string!’

  If that was the case he must have been cutting chaff, or dealing with rats; but there didn’t seem much reason to explain. He often made himself a sort of cloak from old grain sacks, too; but then, nearly everyone did when it rained.

  ‘It’s so sad to think of his type disappearing,’ Constance continued, with a dramatic sigh. ‘Landflucht, you know. Soon the true peasant class will all be gone, with hardly anything to even show that they were here.’

  ‘Would you like to meet Grandfather?’ I asked, to change the subject, for something about the way she spoke of Doble was making me feel uncomfortable, though I couldn’t have said what.

  ‘Oh yes! Very much. Nowadays it really is the ancients who are the true keepers of wisdom, don’t you think?’

  I wondered what Father would say to that. I adored him, as girls do their fathers, and was as grateful for his good favour as a puppy that wants to please; but at the same time I knew that he was not perfect, for he was testy when it came to matters touching o
n his authority, and unpredictable at times, too. But the farm was a heavy responsibility, so it was hardly surprising; and I felt secretly that I understood him even when he was in a temper – perhaps even better than Mother did.

  Constance stood and gazed at the corn in the next field, the one we called Crossways; it was only about a foot high and looked thin to me, and I knew that unless it rained soon the harvest would be poor again. Seven Acres, far away on the other side of the farm buildings, was fallow as Father had instructed – something that wasn’t spoken of at Wych Farm. Of course, she wouldn’t know any of that.

  Frank was checking the snares in the ditch on the far side of Middle Ley, where it met Hulver Wood. He straightened up as he saw us approach, shading his eyes against the mid-morning sun. The elders were in bloom, holding the creamy plates of their flowers up to the sky; somewhere deep in their dense green foliage wood-pigeons clattered and fought.

  ‘Is that your father?’ Constance asked, raising an arm to wave. It wasn’t such a strange question; Frank was tall and broad for seventeen, and he wore long trousers. He had recently begun, a little clumsily, to shave.

  ‘No, that’s Frank, my brother,’ I said as we drew closer. ‘Frank, this is Constance –’

  ‘Constance FitzAllen,’ she called, striding forward and pumping his hand firmly in hers. ‘So: behold the heir apparent! I’m here to learn all your secrets, as you’ve probably heard.’

  Frank said nothing, just looked from one of us to the other. I found that for some reason I couldn’t quite meet his eye.

  ‘Secrets?’ he said at last.

  ‘Why, yes: your country wisdom and ways. But I’m afraid I’ve rather distracted your sister from her duties.’ She stood with her hands in her pockets, quite at ease and smiling. ‘I’m ever so sorry; it won’t happen again.’

  ‘Likely it will,’ he replied. ‘She’s a rare one for it.’

  I took the whetstone from my pocket and gave it to him.