by Katie Hutton
‘The M.O. says he’s been refusing meat – won’t eat horse, apparently. You can see how starved he is. I don’t want to have to explain a death.’
‘He’ll do better in Princetown, then. They’ve got vegetarians and all sorts of cranks there.’
‘I suppose you’re right. He doesn’t seem to have been that much trouble anywhere – always the same misdemeanours: trying to look out of the window or raising his head at exercise. And every place he’s been sent he starts by curling up in his corner like a hedgehog. It’s beyond me why a man who hates to be penned up doesn’t just get outside with the others and do his duty.’
‘He has no sense of duty, sir. Gypsies don’t. Parasitical, I call it – always a foot in the door to get something from those who do an honest day’s work. They’re like the Jews, sir, their loyalty is only to themselves.’
‘Except that Jews stick together – always helping their own. No one has ever come to see Loveridge. And he’s never given us a next of kin.’
CHAPTER 3
But the boys who were killed in the trenches,
Who fought with no rage and no rant,
We left them stretched out on their pallets of mud
Low down with the worm and the ant.
Robert Graves, Armistice Day, 1918
Armistice
Chingestone
With the peal of bells, the tension broke. Unbuttoning her overall, Mrs Colton rushed to the door, flinging it open to the cold air and the running feet. She turned back to the counter. ‘Ellen!’
‘Yes, Mrs Colton?’
‘Leave those tablecloths. It’s over! I’m shutting up shop. There’ll be no more work done in fields or forge today. We’ll be expected at the chapel.’
Ellen ran her hand across the crisp linen. She could not look up. ‘I’ll give thanks here, in my own way.’
‘But—’
‘Please. I don’t feel able to celebrate – and I don’t want to spoil anyone else’s joy.’
‘Come out from behind that counter at least.’
Ellen obeyed, and her employer embraced her. The girl caught a whiff of the rose-scented face powder that was Mrs Colton’s only vanity.
‘ “The Lord is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart”, Ellen.’
*
The girl bolted the door after her employer and pulled down the blinds that were used to protect the window display on days when the sun shone brightly – not that day. She sat in the chair reserved for customers and folded her hands in her lap, thinking about the other girls who would come to the shop for their bottom drawer, those whose sweethearts would return. She heard a brass band strike up ‘Abide with Me’, the sound pinched by the cold air. I am alone, she thought, picturing the scene in the tiny Primitive Methodist chapel, crammed to the doors. I shall always be alone. In the lengthening shadows she began to whisper a prayer, but the well-known words meant nothing and were soon engulfed in sobs.
*
At No. 2 Army Remount Depot in Abbeville, Picardy, Corporal Loveridge (Farrier) found himself on a charge of insubordination – again. This time he had simply asked when he might go home.
CHAPTER 4
What Hath God Wrought!
Numbers 23:23
Chingestone
4th June 1922
Ellen looked up at the ridge of the Chiltern Hills for reassurance, a habit learned over five lonely years.
‘Leave the path men have made and all God’s greatness is there,’ her grandfather was in the habit of telling her. She thought of those hills as clay in the Creator’s hands, long ago when the world was made, and how they would still be there when she herself was clay, having passed through the arc of life with only one memory of a man’s lips on her skin. She’d never bear any husband’s name, nor suffer the pains of childbed ordained for all mothers ever since Eve ate the apple.
Ellen walked swiftly, crossing the road to avoid passing in front of one of the small Victorian villas lining the high street, then recrossed twenty yards further down. Feeling eyes on her, she glanced up and saw the wife of the Wesleyan minister watching her from the baywindow of the manse, and looked away. Let them all think I’m touched!
Ellen passed the forge, then the general store and the butcher’s, turning right past the Red Lion, the reek of beer and Woodbines reaching her from the open door of the public bar. Five taverns in this village, one to every forty inhabitants, and as a member of the Band of Hope she had never entered any of them. But it was easier to pass the Red Lion than that pretty house on the high street with that imagined fireside, her foot rocking a wooden crib, Charlie reading to a little girl in a starched pinafore. Walking home on the day their engagement had been announced in chapel, he’d tucked her arm under his, and said, ‘Now tell me, Ellen, which of them houses would you want for ours?’
‘Those houses, Charlie!’
‘You’re not in the school today, Mistress Quainton!’
‘And you know we can’t afford it. Besides, I love your mother. I’d like it, just the three of us in her cottage.’
‘Won’t be just the three of us for long, God willing! Anyway, I’d like that one there!’
Ellen remembered those words now more accurately than the face of the man who had spoken them. She turned onto the green, the old heart of the village with its cluster of thatched and slated flint cottages. The grass was newly mown, its fresh scent mingling in the warm, still air with that of the flowers in the gardens. This little quadrangle, along with the Primitive Methodist chapel and Sunday school – two knocked-through cottages just where the village tailed out into the fields – were now the limits of her world.
*
In the Wesleyan manse, Rose Newcomb was laying the table for Sunday dinner. Standing in the doorway, her husband said, ‘I think, Rose, I shall need to speak to the rector again. I know it’s none of my business but those Wixon children have been making a nuisance of themselves with the Prims again. Their father thinks it’s funny. He dared me to go to the squire when I cornered him about it the last time, if you’ll remember.’
‘You didn’t, of course.’
‘You know as well as I that I’d have been wasting my time. The corn factor – I never can remember the fellow’s name – told me that this morning the brats threw homemade fireworks into Grandfather Quainton’s path.’
‘Can’t Quainton speak for himself? Or that fussy solicitor’s clerk who is always with him?’
‘Of course,’ he said, nettled. ‘But Quainton is an awkward old cuss when he’s not in his pulpit – up there, apparently, he can chill the blood if he wants to. And anyway, we’re more . . . more . . .’
‘Respectable, Frank?’
‘Yes. I believe the rector will listen more readily to me.’
*
C.G. Lambourne – Private – Fifth Dorsetshire.
Ellen reached down and touched her fingers to the name plate on the handsome Portland stone cross. It had been a dignified ceremony in its own way, despite the lady of the manor being all got up like a galleon in full sail, and the mayor squat and sweaty and a little tawdry beside her, longing to be back in his favourite armchair in the masonic lodge, pipe in hand, where such shrill and bossy beings could not reach him. The Rector had spoken in that peculiar sing-song way of his that he employed in the pulpit. Mr Newcomb had read a poem; Ellen thought she might ask him what it was, but not yet. For the Prims, her grandfather Oliver had read from Ecclesiastes, as usual without notes. Ellwood the Quaker, who had been a stretcher-bearer, asked that the fallen be remembered in silence, but no one knew when to end it, until the mayor had cleared his throat impressively and her ladyship had said, ‘So be it!’ in her brittle voice. Poor Grace Lambourne had drooped and wept throughout the ceremony, batting away those who urged her to ‘be strong for your boy’s sake!’, with only a tearless, pale Ellen at her elbow allowed to comfort her, because Ellen had said nothing, just held her upper arm and stroked it gently with her thumb. Finally the vi
llage band played, inevitably, one verse of ‘Abide with Me’, and it was over.
‘Oh, Charlie!’ Ellen murmured. ‘One day I’ll come to France and see where they’ve put you, and I’ll put some earth from your own vegetable plot over you. I don’t know when, but even if I’m an old lady you’ll wait for me, and I for you.’
First a telegram, and now a monument. She looked at the other names, and saw all those young men as though still alive, walking off the fields at supper time, bringing the cart back on Tuesdays from the market, bending and striking at a horseshoe, standing up in the chapel and crying aloud that God spoke within.
Grace Lambourne now stood at a short distance, head bowed. She and Mrs Munday held each other’s elbows and leaned gently into each other. The Munday twins were listed, in strict alphabetical order, beneath Charlie’s name.
Couldn’t they have put their Christian names? wondered Ellen. Then, as if she read her thoughts, Grace said, ‘It’s the same as his headstone, Ellen, only there he’ll have a little poem I wanted too.’
‘Oh Grace,’ said Ellen, turning, crying at last.
*
The two women were the last to leave, and Ellen looked back more than once as they walked away. The cross resembled, more and more at a distance, a sword thrust into a rock.
‘It don’t look right, do it, Ellen? What was wrong with our local stone what those poor boys knew?’
‘They say it’s the same as the cenotaph that way – and the stones they’re putting above them in France.’
Grace’s grip on Ellen’s arm tightened. ‘I hate to think of him lying there amongst strangers.’
‘They won’t be strangers, Grace. They’ll be the boys he wrote to us about. His pals.’
‘I shall never get over it, Ellen.’
No more shall I, thought the girl, but had no intention of comparing her grief with that of a mother. ‘It’s the worst sorrow,’ was all she said.
Grace stopped on the path.
‘Thank you, Ellen, for not quoting scripture at me today,’ she said. ‘That’s all everyone else has done, but it won’t . . . it won’t do, you know. I am too angry with God,’ she added, with the sudden frankness of one at ease with her faith. ‘I hope I don’t offend you talking like that?’
‘No.’ Ellen smiled. ‘I’m angry too – perhaps not with God but with all those that think they speak for Him. But you’ve reminded me I needed to speak to Mr Chown about the tea-meeting. I’ll see you indoors and then I’ll go round to his.’
‘Go now, Ellen. I shall be fine. But come and see me soon. If I’m not seeing things, then that’s Judith Chown up there on the gate by the stables, looking cross. You could go along with her.’
Ellen laughed. ‘Judy always looks cross! All right, I shall call tomorrow after work.’
*
‘Blessed waste of time all that was!’ spat Judith, scrambling down from the gate and planting her hands on her hips. Where Ellen was reticent and self-effacing to the degree that not everyone noticed immediately the charm of blue eyes in an oval face, framed by a soft cloud of light brown hair, Judith Chown was a force of nature, with her black shingled bob and mobile red mouth.
‘Ah, Judy, it gives comfort to some.’
‘To you – to her?’ Judith inclined her head in the direction of Grace’s cottage.
‘No.’
‘And my Reggie’s name oughter been on there too.’
‘He lives and breathes, Judy.’
‘What’s left of him. I’m supposed to be grateful for that – I know. Luckier than your poor Charlie, but he don’t see it that way. Not the way he is. But we’ve been through all that and he won’t see reason and won’t see me. So there it is. You going home now?’
‘I was going to see your pa,’ said Ellen.
‘Old misery guts? I’d’ve thought you’d heard enough of ’im after this morning’s preaching. He oughter been called Job, not Harold, for the way he goes on about ’im all the time.’
‘He’s a good man, your father.’
‘So was Job, I expect. Don’t suppose he was much fun to live with either!’ said Judith.
*
Harold Chown stood at the door of his cottage. A little above middle height, Judith’s father, on passing fifty, had begun to put on weight. His hair was still plentiful, though now iron-grey, and his face retained the vestiges of good looks, marred by the muddiness of complexion of a man who has worked most of his life indoors, and by his own reluctance to smile.
‘Miss Quainton.’
‘Good evening, Brother Chown. I just called for the readings for next Sunday. And Grandfer wants to know if the date of the tea-meeting has been decided.’
‘Ah. Um . . . come in,’ Chown said, as he ducked his head and backed into the little parlour. Judith followed them in without greeting her father and went to crash amongst the saucepans in the back scullery.
‘I don’t want to be any trouble,’ said Ellen.
‘You’re none whatsoever. I must say, Miss Quainton, that it is rare to encounter round the circuit such conscientiousness as yours.’
Ellen smiled faintly at this. Judith regularly made a mock of her father’s slightly pompous choice of words (‘You’d think he was a judge in a wig to hear him, Ellen, not Lightfoot’s old clerk!’).
‘Um . . . I know of no other Sunday school teacher who takes the trouble to plan her lessons on the readings of that day,’ he went on.
‘Oh . . .’ Ellen reddened a little at his compliments, and with her left hand rubbed the back of her neck. ‘Well, it makes it easier for me, you see. I don’t have to think of something new.’
Harold took a step forward and grasped her right hand in both his own.
‘Today cannot have been easy for you, Miss Quainton. But one must not question the will of God.’
Mustn’t one?
Ellen gently extricated her hand.
‘Indeed, Brother Chown.’
‘It’s not quite the same thing, of course,’ he said with unconscious clumsiness, ‘but when I lost Judith’s mother—’
‘Of course, a terrible loss,’ she said, echoing his words and wishing the conversation over. Judith had told her friend that Harold seldom spoke of his dead wife, so why now? ‘I expect you never get over it,’ she added with finality.
‘No . . . yes . . . um . . . I mean, you are right, of course.’ He rubbed his palms down the sides of his thighs, as if they were damp, though when he had grasped Ellen’s hand they had felt cool and dry, and slightly rough.
‘Let me get you those readings,’ he said.
CHAPTER 5
Tis thus they live – a picture to the place,
A quiet, pilfering, unprotected race.
John Clare, Gipsies
Stopping Place
Surman’s Wood, Chingstone, Summer 1922
Unobserved except by the rooks circling above, three brightly painted Gypsy caravans rocked and swayed off the road and into the cool depths of Surman’s Wood. Two ragged children ran ahead under the trees. A lanky young man in shirtsleeves and a fedora walked backwards before the first wagon, guiding it.
‘Mind that rabbit hole, Mother!’
‘Mind it yourself, boy!’ laughed the old woman holding the reins of a piebald horse, easing her pipe into the corner of her mouth. Both of the vardos1 that followed were driven by thick-set, frowning men – clearly brothers – each with a silent woman beside him, and smaller faces clustering behind. A woman of about twenty-five came next on foot, leading a roan pony. She wore a loose white blouse, a velvet waistcoat too warm for that evening, but which she wore fastened to emphasise her slender waist, and a skirt that flowed with her undulating walk. Her black curling hair was held back by a red silk scarf tied about a head that she held with the air of a princess. Lucretia Loveridge had learned early to charge a decent fee to amateur photographers; a stinging slap rewarded any man who attempted more than a photograph. A melancholy barefoot teenage boy in a to
o-large man’s jacket leading another horse ended the little procession.
‘Pick up your long face, little brother,’ the young woman called to him. ‘We’re on this atchin’ tan2 till September.’
There would be work – first the hay harvest, and then the crops. This would bring enough money to pay for the new vardo ordered from the carriage-works in Reading. Camped by the stream in the wood, they would need to disturb no one for water, but the villages were near at hand for Lucretia and her two sisters-in-law to hawk clothes pegs and fortunes, and to beg cast-off clothes. And who would miss the occasional rabbit when they were so plentiful?
*
Judith and her father sat opposite each other, the tea things between them.
‘Does your friend have any followers, Judith?’
‘Who, Ellen? No, she’s too particular – or too wedded to the memory of the dear departed. Why you asking?’
‘Well, I don’t know . . . um . . . a pleasant girl like her. And Charlie Lambourne dead five years – a more than decent interval.’
‘I think she’s given up, Pa, like the rest of us. And who’d brave her grandfer to walk out with her, anyways? Poor Charlie went in fear of him as it was.’
‘I am sure Oliver merely wishes to protect her.’
‘Why do you ask? Sweet on her yourself, Pa? Doubt she’d look at you twice!’
Harold flushed. ‘Really, Judith, you can be quite vulgar sometimes. I don’t know where you get it from – not from your poor mother, I’m sure. Can you not eat faster, daughter – we shall be late for the prayer meeting.’
‘We?’
‘I merely remind you of it, Judith. Whether you attend is a matter for your own conscience.’
