Sorry for the Dead

by Nicola Upson

  Her guide set off at a brisk pace round the front of the house, and Josephine hurried to keep up. “The marvelous thing about being here is that we’ve finally got enough land to teach women everything they need to know about gardening,” George said, passing the pond and taking a narrow path that led to the right of the walled garden. “The students who come here expect the sort of grounding that will help them to make a living from it. That’s what makes us different—a woman’s interest in horticulture shouldn’t begin and end with a vase of bloody flowers.” Her outspokenness amused Josephine, and she wondered if George was as direct with the girls in her charge. “And we’ve got the potential to expand too,” she continued. “Our landlord is renting us a few acres of agricultural land, so at last we’ll be able to work on a decent scale.”

  She stopped suddenly by an orchard, whose trees were too mature to have been planted during the life of the college. “We’re lucky with these,” George said, reaching up to thin one of the branches that was particularly laden with young fruit. “There are more than twenty varieties here already, and we’re going to turn the next field over to more in the autumn. If we convert one of the outbuildings to a cool room, we can store the fruit over the winter months and supply our customers for most of the year.”

  “Which varieties grow best here?”

  “Worcester Pearmain, Egremont Russet, Beauty of Bath …”

  “Charles Ross?” George looked impressed by her knowledge, and Josephine was sorry to disillusion her. “Nothing to do with growing them, I’m afraid. My father’s a fruiterer in Inverness, and apples are one of his specialties. I was brought up on some of those names.”

  “Ah well, we’re all in the same game, whether we grow the food or sell it. If your father were a little nearer, I’d be looking to do business with him.” She smiled and wandered farther into the orchard, unable to pull herself away from a task now that she had noticed it needed doing. Josephine watched as she thinned apples out wherever the growing fruit would make the branches too heavy, choosing her sacrifices quickly and without sentiment, and letting them fall to the ground. Her passion for her work—the single-mindedness that Miss Ingham had referred to—was already obvious, and Josephine envied her for it; one day, she hoped to find a vocation that gave her the same degree of satisfaction, although she knew in her heart that it would not be teaching.

  Seeing that the tour had been temporarily sidetracked, she selected a tree of her own to work on and followed George’s example, using a straightforward task to get her bearings and soak up the atmosphere of her new home. Through the apple trees on the far side of the orchard she could just make out a row of rounded rooftops, which she assumed belonged to the shepherd’s huts that Harriet had mentioned. “Is that where the students sleep?” she asked.

  “That’s right. If I were younger, I’d be tempted to join them. There’s something joyous about an outdoor life, don’t you think?”

  In moderation, Josephine thought to herself, but voiced a more tactful answer. “There must be a lot to worry about, though.”

  “Yes, it can be hard work at times, but it’s not without its rewards.” She came over to inspect the tree that Josephine had been working on and nodded approvingly. “You learn quickly, but this had better wait for another day. I expect you want to meet your girls.”

  George walked on and the extent of the college’s operation became more obvious as they rounded the corner of the garden wall and came out into an area of orderly greenhouses, potting sheds, and cold frames, with a large stretch of land beyond that was obviously a work in progress. “Was this already here when you arrived?” Josephine asked, curious to know how so much had been achieved in what seemed to her a very short space of time.

  “Good grief, no. We had the orchard and one or two dilapidated outbuildings, but the rest we’ve built up from scratch.”

  “So where on earth did you start?”

  “Well, the real genius was in choosing the right spot,” George explained, “and that was entirely down to Harry. She’s from this part of the world, so she suggested we should look here. I knew as soon as I saw Charleston that it would be ideal—sheltered and sunny, so we could force the produce on and make it saleable in the early season, and we’re only a spit from Glynde Station so nothing is a problem to transport. It wasn’t perfect, by any means, and I’d have ruined us in a fortnight by expanding too quickly, but Harry is a hard taskmaster when it comes to balancing the books.” It was another reference to the individual strengths that Harriet had mentioned, and Josephine listened, impressed by the way that each woman acknowledged the other’s importance in the business. “Rome wasn’t built in a day, I suppose, but then we weren’t in charge of that.” She laughed, then spoke more seriously. “It feels wrong to profit from the war, but we’ve got to be hard-headed about it. The longer it goes on, the more urgent the issue of food production is going to become. Do you realize that we still import half of our food from abroad?” Josephine shook her head. “Ludicrous, in war or peace, when we have everything we need to grow it ourselves. But that’s got to change—the German U-boats will make sure of that—and when it does, we’ll be ahead of the game here. There are no limits to what we can do in the future if we work hard now.”

  “Miss Barker—Harriet—said something about getting support from the government.”

  “That’s right. They’ve sent someone down to scout us out—odd sort of chap if you ask me. Not very forthcoming, but he knows his stuff, and at least he takes the situation more seriously than Asquith seems to. I’m confident he’ll give us a favorable report. We’ve got the ideal site here, as I said, and a long lease if we want it, with the potential to take students for proper two-year courses. That’s what’s really needed. You can’t teach gardening overnight.”

  Josephine smiled to herself, mentally striking off a third of Harriet’s predicted tally. She followed George through a creaky wooden gate to the walled garden adjacent to the house, and was instantly struck by the atmosphere of ordered peace. It was a large area, divided naturally into sections by paths or low boxed hedges, and the students were engrossed in their respective tasks, working in pairs or small groups. To Josephine’s untrained eye, the various plots seemed to offer perfect examples of almost every fruit and vegetable under the sun: onions and broad beans in the straightest of rows; potatoes earthed up in neat trenches; cane wigwams supporting runner beans and peas; and tender young leaves of things she didn’t recognize, all protected by yards of netting and a scarecrow dressed jauntily in college colors, with a face painted to look uncannily like George’s. Around the walls, various fruits were espaliered against the brick, with the crowning glory of an enormous fig tree on the south side. Close to the house, where its colors and scent could be better appreciated, a flower garden flourished in shades of purple, pink, and white, with painted sage and lavender spilling out onto the paths.

  “You should have seen this when we first arrived,” George said. “They must have let it run wild for years—completely overgrown and impossible to walk from one side to the other.”

  “That’s hard to believe. It looks so productive.”

  “It is now, but it took us a good six months to make it fit for any sort of planting. Have you met Vera?”

  “No, not yet.”

  “She’s the person to talk to about what this used to be like. She did a lot of the hard work in the early days. I don’t know what we’d have done without her.” The garden gate flew back again with a screech of impatience at being disturbed, and Jeannie winked at Josephine over the pile of seed trays that she was carrying through from the greenhouses. “Ah, Miss Sellwood—perfect timing. Go and round the girls up, will you? I’d like to introduce them to Miss Tey and give them the good news about their extra morning lessons.”

  Jeannie did as she was asked, and one by one the students downed tools and gathered round their principal. Charity Lomax—apparently recovered from the humiliation of being hauled home in a deliver
y van—held no grudges and greeted Josephine as if they were lifelong acquaintances, and even Betty Norwood managed a faint smile of acknowledgment. As the stragglers from the furthest parts of the garden took their place in the group, Josephine looked with interest at the girls, trying in vain to spot Betty’s twin, but only when each student introduced herself did she identify an attractive, fair-haired girl in the front row as Dorothy Norwood. The sisters could scarcely have been more different, and Josephine was reminded of a weather house that stood on her mother’s mantelpiece at home, with its contrasting rain and shine figures, each of whom could only take prominence by pushing the other back into the shadows. When everyone had given her name, she thanked them for her welcome and talked briefly about her work at Anstey, hoping that experience would give her some authority over girls who were almost her contemporaries.

  “Now, since you started here at Charleston, some of you have complained about the physical nature of the work,” George said with a glint in her eye, looking directly at Charity. “Gardening can be strenuous and tiring when you’re new to it, so with that in mind, I’ve asked Miss Tey to devise a morning class that will better equip you for the tasks that you face every day. As you’ve heard, she specializes in fitness and physiotherapy, so from tomorrow your day will begin forty-five minutes earlier than usual with an exercise class at a quarter past six exactly.” Her announcement was met with a universal groan of protest, which Josephine could heartily have echoed. “Really, you don’t have to thank me—never let it be said that I don’t take your complaints seriously.” Several of the girls glared at Charity, and Josephine guessed that she would not be quickly forgiven for giving Miss H the excuse to do what she was going to do anyway. “I expect you to take these classes on with a good grace and to work as hard for Miss Tey as you do for me,” George continued. “That’s all for now. You’re free to carry on with what you were doing.”

  Josephine watched them go, noticing that they all returned to their tasks with an eagerness to please that bore out what Jeannie had told her about George’s teaching. “They’re not a bad lot,” the principal said, “and one or two of them have shown a natural flair for horticulture since they arrived—enough to make a good living from it if they choose to.”

  “What sort of posts do your students go on to?” Josephine asked.

  “It varies. There’s more demand for them now in the big houses, for obvious reasons—and in increasingly senior positions. I’ve had girls who’ve thrown their lot in together and formed co-operatives to make more profit out of the land, and there are plenty of temporary positions. One woman came here last month looking for someone to care for her country garden while she’s in London. Another single lady wanted some guidance on landscaping and thought it would be nice to have a companion to share the work.” She bent down to rescue a seedling that had been partially pulled from the ground by a bird. “There’s no shortage of opportunity for women who are well trained—and not before time. An eye for detail, gentleness, the instinct to nurture—those are the qualities that make a good gardener, and in my experience they tend to be found more reliably in women than in men, wouldn’t you say?”

  The comment was distinctly at odds with the ill treatment that Miss Ingham had warned them about; in fact, everything about life at the college so far had been an unconscious defense against the accusation, and Josephine was more curious than ever about what might have inspired it. George obviously misconstrued her lack of response, because she pressed the point. “Patriotism, powers of organization, unbounded enthusiasm—there are great things expected of women now, and these are the qualities that will help them succeed. Are you excited by the opportunities that suffrage has given you, Miss Tey?”

  “I’ve always been very lucky,” Josephine admitted, considering the question. “I’m one of three daughters, and we’ve had every opportunity to succeed because my father is ambitious for his children to have a better life. He’s worked his way up from nothing to own property and provide for his family, so the struggles I’ve grown up with are about class, not gender. If he thinks differently about us because we’re girls, I’ve never noticed it, but I doubt he’d recognize that as suffrage.”

  George nodded, giving Josephine the impression that she respected an honest answer more than an easy one. She led the way out of the garden, following the path to the right of the house, which took them past a chicken run and through a wooden archway smothered by cascading pink and white roses. “These are stunning,” Josephine said, stopped briefly in her tracks by the fragrance. “I can see why you’ve chosen a rose as the college emblem.”

  “Not just any rose. We named these two varieties ten years ago when we first started the business, the pink after Harriet and the white after me. The fact that they flourish here seems to be a good omen.” They had come almost full circle to the kitchen door, but instead George crossed the yard to a small single-story building opposite the main house. “We’d better get you kitted out,” she called back over her shoulder, unlocking the door and ushering Josephine into what was obviously her office. The room was dark and smelt faintly of wood and polish, like a vestry in a church, with a large desk in the middle, a workbench down one side with cupboards below, and piles of logs next to a small fire in the corner. The wall above the bench was lined with shelves—row after row of jars and bottles containing everything from seeds and beans to weed killer and other poisons, all carefully labeled. George took a Hessian apron, a pair of secateurs, and a pruning knife out of a cupboard and handed them to Josephine with a smile. “These are yours. All we’ve got to do now is teach you how to use them.”

  CHAPTER 3

  There were two new faces at breakfast the next morning. Neither Simon Cassidy nor Peter Whittaker had been present at supper on Josephine’s first evening, and she was introduced to them both as soon as she came downstairs. The government official was, as George had said, an odd sort of chap—a middle-aged man with receding gray hair and dandruff on his collar, stiff and formal in a dark suit that belonged to a different age and was starkly at odds with the youthful energy of the morning. Cassidy was obviously uncomfortable with the forced intimacy of lodgings and did nothing more than return Josephine’s greeting. By contrast, Peter Whittaker—still dressed in the blue uniform of the convalescent camp—grinned at her with an easy familiarity, no less cocky without his friends to egg him on, and she gave what she hoped was a passable impression of seeing him for the first time.

  “How did you sleep?” Jeannie asked as Josephine joined her by the sideboard, where breakfast was laid out in silver dishes. “I came to say goodnight, but your lamp was already out.”

  “Sorry about that. I was gone as soon as my head hit the pillow. Then I woke with the light and couldn’t go back to sleep for fear of missing my own class.”

  “It went well, I gather. I heard Lanton and Macdonald singing your praises as they passed by my window earlier.”

  “Whoever they are. I don’t think I’ll ever remember all their names.”

  “Coffee will help. Take mine and I’ll pour another one.”

  “Thank you.” Josephine looked round at the room that she had been too tired to take in properly the night before, wondering if the floral pattern on the wallpaper—a peculiar hybrid of poppy and daisy that had no actual counterpart in nature—had been Harriet’s choice or George’s. She sat down next to Jeannie, pleased to be able to get on with her breakfast while George took the lead in the conversation. “It’s all very well to have these voluntary outfits all over the country,” she was saying, with Simon Cassidy firmly in her sights, “but the government should be coordinating what they do, or their work will overlap and waste the charitable funds we’re raising for them. If you ask me, the railways would be a good place to start. Growers should get together and bulk-send their produce with cheaper transit. That way, we could improve the quality of the food for people living in the cities and keep most of the profit where it rightly belongs—with the person who grows
it in the first place. That’s just common sense, and you could make it happen overnight if you wanted to.”

  Cassidy cleared his throat and straightened his spectacles. “As a precaution during the war, we might consider—”

  “Bugger the war. You should be doing it anyway. At least the war might teach us to be a bit more resourceful about the amount of food we grow and the way we store and preserve it.”

  “Let’s keep it going for as long as possible then, shall we?” Whittaker’s voice was heavy with sarcasm. He stared defiantly at George, who ignored him, and Josephine got the impression that sparring such as this was a common feature of mealtimes. “Men are dying in the thousands, but it’s worth it because the nation is finally making jam.”

  The provocation got its intended reaction. “For God’s sake, Peter, grow up,” George said, losing her patience. “I don’t suppose the name Hilda Horsley means anything to you, does it? Or Florence Kay? No, I thought not. Well they died too—in a Zeppelin attack, along with fifty other women, and I dare say they won’t be the last. Women are making sacrifices as well, even though they have absolutely no say in this war or how it’s being fought. It’s not good enough any more to ignore us and point to the battlefields. Things are changing.”

  “For some women, perhaps, if they’re privileged to begin with. It’s interesting, isn’t it, that your lot think of working on the land as patriotism, while working-class women just call it the same old slog they’ve been doing for years.”

  “I’m sure it suits you to believe they think like that,” George argued, ‘but they’re foolish if they do. We’re fighting against lower wages for all women. Everyone benefits, irrespective of class.”

  “Except the men who still rely on the land to feed their families. All you’re doing is forcing their rates of pay down by taking the labor from under their noses.”

  The row was threatening to get out of hand, and to Josephine’s ears there was a personal quality to the exchanges. Whittaker seemed to inspire the same sort of dislike in George as he obviously did in Jeannie, and she wondered why he chose to stay at the farmhouse rather than at Summerdown; perhaps Harriet kept the peace, but there was no sign of her so far this morning. Simon Cassidy pushed his empty plate away and sat back in his chair, and Josephine noticed how intently he was listening to everything that was said. “Soon there won’t be any men left to work the land,” George pointed out. “As you said, they’ll be needed to fight.”