All Among the Barley Page 5

  It fell to John to keep the trap, the wagons and the tumbril in good repair, as well as the Fordson in case it should be called upon. And it was he who took Moses, Malachi and Meg to be shod, and who saw to them when they were ill, consulting a book the rest of us were not allowed to see.

  ‘It’s nothing but some silly old superstition, like those hag-stones he’s got hanging up over the stable door,’ Frank told me once, when I conceived a scheme to get a look at his mysterious book. ‘He probably can’t even read very well, Ed.’

  ‘Well, it won’t do any harm, then,’ I replied. ‘If it’s not black magic or anything.’ But Frank flat-out refused to climb the ladder to John’s lodging when he wasn’t there, and I lacked the courage, and so let the matter drop.

  It was John I thought of when I found the landrail chick floppy and nearly lifeless in the coop on only its second day hatched. It struggled a little as I cupped it in my hands, its huge feet working, but it was clearly very weak. John was good with animals of all kinds, not just the horses; he’d helped Frank rear a leveret one year, and had bound up the leg of a deer that had been hit by a motor-car in the lane, keeping it in an old sheep pen and feeding it hay and linseed cake until at last it could be let go. For all that, he had no compunction about shooting rooks, rabbits and pigeons, or anything else that threatened our crops.

  ‘It’s half-starved, poor mite,’ he told me that morning, holding a hand out for the landrail chick. He was eating breakfast in the kitchen, where I had rushed back after feeding the chickens. He set down the old bone-handled knife he brought to every meal and gently lifted the bird’s stubby wings to see the frail body beneath.

  ‘Edie, you must find it something – quickly, now. And some water. Perhaps your mother could lend us that eye-dropper of hers.’

  Mother, washing lettuces, dried her hands on her apron and went to fetch the dropper from upstairs.

  ‘What can it eat, John?’ I asked.

  ‘Go and find some worms, or slugs, insects – anything like that. You’ll need to mash them up and feed them to it on the end of a match.’

  ‘I’ll do it, if you can’t bear to kill them,’ said Frank, finishing his porridge and pushing his bowl and spoon away from him for Mother to wash up.

  ‘That’s all right, I can manage – honestly I can.’

  ‘Suit yourself.’

  Beside the barn, what had long ago been a sheep pen and dip was now a place where old and half-broken things were kept, in case a use should be found for them: a broken churn, the iron seat from a mower, a pair of end ladders from a wagon, a half-rotted spinning-wheel and some elm paddles whose long-ago use I could only guess at. It was shady there, and cool, and lifting the old, discarded things I picked slug after slug from their damp undersides until I had a dozen or so curled and cold in my hot palm. I ran with them back to the yard, where Doble was leaning over the piggery wall. We had promised a piglet to Mother’s parents, and she and I would be visiting them that afternoon.

  ‘This one, I do believe, Edith,’ Doble said, indicating the animal in question with his stick. ‘He mayn’t look much now, but he’ll fatten up all right.’

  ‘Doble, what can I mash these up with?’ I asked, showing him the slugs.

  ‘Have you a carbuncle? My mother allus swore by a poultice of slugs.’

  ‘No, it’s for a chick to eat, a landrail. It mustn’t die.’

  Doble laughed. ‘Do you put they down on the step there, and I’ll do it. That’s right.’ He pressed on them firmly with his stick. ‘Does John aim to help it eat?’

  ‘Yes. He’s giving it water inside.’

  ‘It’ll be right as rain, then, Edith. You’ll see. That man’s a dab hand with God’s creatures, and all manner o’ what.’

  I picked a dock leaf from by the gate and scooped up the slugs.

  ‘Now, don’t let your mother catch you taking that mess inside,’ he said, and winked.

  By noon the chick looked stronger. John made it a nest of straw in a box and set it on the back windowsill out of the sun. Later that afternoon it sat up, its eyes open, and whenever I drew near, its beak became an urgent pink gape. John showed me how to drop a little water in – not too much, in case it choked – and how to give it bits of food on the end of a match.

  ‘Will it live?’ I asked him.

  ‘Perhaps; perhaps not,’ he said. ‘It’ll only want feeding like this for a day or two, then it’ll be up and about. You’ll have to keep an eye on it for a little while, though, and see that it can find food.’

  ‘I’m going to see Granfer and Grandma this afternoon; should I take it with me?’

  ‘Best leave it here. Your brother can look after it,’ he said.

  To visit my mother’s mother and father was to travel back in time to the olden days. It was as though everything modern – motor-transport, tar-macadam roads, the wireless – didn’t exist for them, and never would. I see now that they were the last of the Victorians, inhabiting a world that had long passed away, and so to be with them was to be granted a temporary reprieve from all the anxieties of the modern age, the sense of things speeding up and going wrong that dogged us all invisibly in those years – even me. The War had touched them, of course, in the shape of Harry’s death; but despite the hand-tinted photograph in its oval frame it was never spoken of: an aberration that had happened once, was in the past, and would never be allowed to occur again.

  I climbed down from the trap to be held briefly at arm’s length by Grandma, her one good eye scanning me closely but kindly so that she might understand how I was; then came a light embrace during which I inhaled the smell of rue and King’s Empire tobacco that clung to her shawl before I was passed to my grandfather and wrapped in his still-strong arms.

  ‘Hullo, lass. Oh, but it’s a treat to have you here.’

  Doble had wrapped the piglet in a grain sack with its feet tied. I went to lift it from the cart, but Mother reached past me and swung it easily out, handing the squealing bundle to Grandma, who took it to the little pen behind their dwelling and released it. Granfer uncoupled Meg from the trap and led her past neat rows of vegetables to their little paddock, where a piebald goat was tethered.

  ‘Do you come inside, the both of you,’ Grandma called to us from the step.

  The cottage my mother had grown up in had been tied, like Doble’s, but Granfer had saved all his working life and when he retired as head horseman he’d bought a railway carriage with a little strip of land two miles from Wych Farm, one of six carriages all inhabited by the elderly. A pot-bellied stove kept their two rooms warm in winter; they grew or traded most of what they needed, as the others did, and bought items such as tea and tobacco from the carrier when he came. Granfer missed the horses, naturally, and talked of them often; but they were entirely content with their lot.

  Mary had walked over from Monks Tye and was sitting in Granfer’s rocking chair nursing the baby, which was then five months old; she smiled as we came in, but didn’t rise.

  For a long time, when we were children, Mary and I were inseparable. We shared a bed until she was twelve; not for lack of space, for the farmhouse had more than enough rooms to go around, but because we liked to be with one another – and because of the drowning nightmares I had as a very small child, from which I would surface gasping and choking for air, and which meant that for a long while I feared being left alone. We would wait for sleep spooning, and if I had a bad dream Mary would comfort me; we became so used to one another’s movements and the rhythm of our hearts and breath that it was almost as though we were one child, our long hair tangled together as we slept. It meant that even our worst fights were bracketed by closeness, for in those years I don’t think we ever once went to sleep back-to-back. And then one morning Father said that it was high time Mary had her own room to sleep in, and that was that.

  And yet I remained linked with her somehow, I felt, for my monthlies had arrived during her marriage service – though I didn’t discover it until we had a
rrived back at the newly empty-seeming farm. Shut in the dim privy, rigid with fright, I’d hoped that perhaps the blood having begun in St Anne’s meant God was protecting me; but with Mary gone there was nobody for me to ask. Mother found out the next day, which was wash-day, but she said little to me beyond giving me a box of necessaries and a wordless embrace, and I asked nothing back.

  Grandma took her place in her chair by the stove and once we had kissed Mary she gestured me and Mother towards the little milking stools they brought out for company. On an oak dresser pewter gleamed dully in the June sun: two tankards, a pepper-pot and salt, a jug, a wide, flat charger and two candlesticks. This Grandma called her ‘garnish’, and along with the lovely old lace mats made long ago by her own grandmother, the pewter pieces were the pride of her home. The walls were hung with horse ornaments: bosses, ear-bells, fly-terrets and face-pieces showing the rose, the fleur-de-lis, the star, three crescents, and one – my favourite – with a lion rampant. These were my grandfather’s, and I loved to hear how he’d come by each: some he’d won at ploughing contests, but others had been handed down from one horseman to another and were who knew how many generations old.

  ‘Here, Edie, do you have some fudge while your granddaddy makes tea.’ Grandma retrieved an old cocoa tin from somewhere beneath her chair and held it out, and I took a golden square from it, crumbly and soft. ‘Now, Ada. I’ve heard from Mary, so do you tell me your news now,’ she said, fishing a matchbox from her apron pocket and lighting her little clay pipe. ‘How are Frank and George?’

  ‘Frank’s well. He’s moving the hens to Great Ley now the hay’s made. The manure will do it good.’

  ‘And George? We expected him here with you to-day.’

  ‘He’s – a little indisposed.’

  There was a pause that I didn’t know how to interpret; I looked at Mary, but she seemed entirely engrossed by the baby at her swollen breast. A red-faced boy with masses of black hair, she’d called him Terence, which I thought rather a horrible name.

  ‘And the men?’

  This meant John and Doble.

  ‘Yes, tolerable. I’ll take some more of that liniment for Doble, if you’ve made any of late. He sends his thanks and says it fair loosens his back.’

  ‘Yes, I have some. John mustn’t use it, though – it won’t do him any good. Besides, the horses.’

  ‘I know, Mother.’

  Granfer brought the tea over on a japanned tray and set it on a little table. The cups and saucers were fine bone-china painted with blowsy cabbage roses; they were the kind the sun glows through, and quite the most valuable thing in the little dwelling. I never really remarked on them at the time, although I have wondered since how they came to be there and how they remained unbroken, given Grandma’s wall eye and Granfer’s hands, twisted like roots from decades of guiding the plough. Even the cups’ gold rims were bright and intact, as though they were new. Perhaps they had been given to Grandma when she was in service; or perhaps they were payment for a favour of some kind.

  ‘All my lovely girls,’ said Granfer, taking the chair opposite Grandma and smiling. ‘How are you both?’

  Mother smiled. ‘We’re well, aren’t we, Edie? Yes, we’re well enough, I’d say.’

  ‘The hay is made?’

  ‘The men will be thatching the rick to-day.’

  ‘Ah, that’s rare news. Haven’t we had the weather for it! We were saying so just yesterday, weren’t we, my dear,’ and he reached across and took Grandma’s hand.

  ‘It seems there are people living over at Hullets,’ Mother said then. I felt my mouth fall open with the surprise of it; so I had seen someone at the window when I was passing its ruins with Frank.

  ‘At Hullets?’ asked Mary. ‘Who?’

  ‘A family.’

  ‘Do you mean . . . so it’s been sold? At last?’

  ‘No. They’re – well, they’re trespassing, from what we can make out.’

  This was troubling. I suppose in many ways I was something of a prig; certainly I was interested in what the law said, and felt that everyone should abide by it, because it had not yet occurred to me that the law might ever be wrong, or unfair. The idea that some people might break the law, just do what they wanted in life – it made me afraid, I suppose, and I turned that fear into a high-minded kind of rectitude, a far nicer feeling to have.

  ‘Well, the police must make them leave,’ I said robustly.

  ‘We haven’t told the police.’

  ‘Why not? They’re not allowed to be there!’

  ‘Because, Edie . . . because they’re poor.’

  ‘Lots of people are poor,’ said Mary. ‘Why don’t they apply for poor relief?’

  ‘I don’t know. Perhaps because they’re not from our parish. They’re – from somewhere else.’

  ‘Why have they come here, then?’

  ‘They’ll be looking for work,’ said Granfer; ‘there’s always folk on the road at harvest-time, child, you know that. Bob Rose will have a few extra shillings for hired hands, I expect.’

  ‘But there are plenty of village people who’ll work for Bob Rose! And anyway, they can’t just move in anywhere they want. Can they? I mean, Hullets isn’t theirs. Someone should tell Lord Lyttleton,’ I said.

  ‘There are children to think of, Edie,’ said Mother. ‘Now, listen to me: I won’t have you talking of this to anyone, do you hear me? Is that understood?’

  I looked to Mary, who raised an eyebrow, but it seemed the subject was closed.

  ‘Now, tell me,’ said Granfer after a moment, ‘how’re they ’osses?’

  This was what he most wanted to know, and as he and my mother talked I looked across to Grandma, whose left eye looked at Mother, the right into the middle distance, her given name of Clarity seeming something of a cruel joke. Although their neighbours now were kind, Mother could recall women turning away superstitiously lest Grandma overlooked them or their animals or children. It was the reason that Mother had, like me, had few friends at school.

  ‘The creature will live,’ she said suddenly, turning her good eye on me. ‘What manner of bird is it, child?’

  I had long ceased to wonder how she knew such things before we told her; she always had, it was just her way.

  ‘It’s a landrail, Grandma,’ I answered. ‘We found three eggs in Great Ley, but the others didn’t hatch.’

  ‘And what other news have you?’

  ‘Frank and I went to the river for the whole day yesterday, and swam. It was marvellous. Oh, and Frank caught a huge tench.’

  Mother and Granfer talked on; Grandma simply looked at me and waited, her head cocked to one side, like a wren.

  ‘Oh yes! I nearly forgot,’ I said, hoping to head her off before she guessed that there was anything bothering me, or – heaven forbid – asked about Alf Rose. ‘A woman came. She’s called Constance FitzAllen and she dresses like a man. She’s writing a book, and she’s staying with Mrs Eleigh at the draper’s. She’ll be here all summer.’

  Grandma nodded. ‘That she will. From which direction did you say she came?’

  ‘Which direction?’

  ‘This Constance brings weather with her, child, as the wind does.’

  ‘Oh – I’m not sure which direction. She just appeared.’

  Baby Terence had finished feeding and was now beginning to grizzle. I knew I should offer to take him from Mary, and perhaps walk up and down with him outside to give her a break, but I didn’t want to. I might have warmed to him more had everyone not examined me so openly for signs of motherliness every time I was in the same room as him; but they made me feel as though I was being tested, and it set me against him somehow.

  Grandma stood at the sound of Terence’s opening wail. ‘Let me take him, girl – there, that’s right.’

  Mary passed the baby to her, and she settled him easily onto her hip and began to show him the brasses on the wall.

  ‘So. How’s the farm, Ed?’ Mary asked. ‘How are the apple trees, and t
he horse-ponds? And are the swallows nesting in the thatch this year?’

  ‘Oh – yes, I think so.’

  ‘How lovely! I miss the sound of them, you know – I was telling Clive about them only the other night.’

  The truth was, I hadn’t paid much heed to the swallows; after all, they built near Mary’s bedroom window, not mine. But Mary had begun to talk rather elegiacally about home since she’d left, as though it were a lost paradise, and I sometimes hardly recognised the place she talked of as the workaday farm where I lived.

  Clive sold vacuum cleaners and other appliances door-to-door, and was considered to be on his way up in the world. He and Mary had rented one of a row of brick houses that had been built in Monks Tye just after the War, very smart and clean, with indoor plumbing, a back boiler and electric lights; they had a moquette settee and matching armchair that they had got on the H.P., and even a Frigidaire. Mother rather envied the little house’s modernity, but I would have felt cooped up in its blank rooms all day long.

  ‘Why don’t you come and visit? You could come back in the trap with us to-day – there’ll be room,’ I said. ‘Come and stay the night.’

  ‘Oh, Ed – I couldn’t.’

  ‘Why not? You never come.’

  ‘It’s just – well, Clive wouldn’t like it, for one thing.’

  ‘But Terence hasn’t ever seen the baby swallows, and they’ll fledge soon,’ I tried. ‘Oh do come. You can sleep in my room – it’ll be just like the old days!’

  She looked at me then with a sympathy I couldn’t bear. ‘Ed, I’m ever so sorry – all Terence’s things are at home, and there’s Clive’s supper to think of. I can’t just . . . do whatever I like, you know. I’m a married woman now.’

  After tea Granfer and I set out for a walk, leaving the women talking together in low voices. It was a warm June day, not so hot as it had been for haysel, but close; the sky was flat and white and a breeze knickled the oats on the far-distant slope beyond the smallholdings and the water meadows where a herd of red polls grazed.