I Leap Over the Wall

by Monica Baldwin

  That, for the present, is enough about my accomplishments. They are only mentioned to illustrate the kind of things I had to display in my shop window.

  Unfortunately, they were not the sort of wares that anyone wanted to buy.

  Aunt Cissie thought it might be a good idea for me to become a masseuse. In her kindness of heart, I think she had visions of me staying around in country houses with ‘really nice people’—to whom she could, of course, have introduced me—restoring, by the simple process of massage, the figures of society ladies who had just produced an infant.

  But even if I had felt attracted by the notion of massaging duchesses—which, oddly enough, I didn’t—there were quite insuperable snags. Di, who knew all about everything—how I envied her her vast and varied experience of life!—assured us that the training required was not only long and arduous, but also extremely expensive. Unless you had an imposing array of letters after your name, you could get nowhere. So that was the end of that.

  I began to feel very Rip Van Winkle-ish indeed.

  (2)

  So far as I can remember, the idea originated with my cousin Margot.

  Land Girls were at a premium in Worcestershire. Everybody’s gardeners had been called up, and the ladies of the countryside were all breaking their backs in a heroic effort to ‘Dig for Victory’ without the assistance of an Outside Man.

  Margot herself was the greatly envied employer of half a Land Girl. The other half belonged to Mrs. Batley, a friend who lived only a few minutes’ walk from Astley Hall. This arrangement was not altogether satisfactory, since Mrs. Batley wanted someone to herself. Margot, too, didn’t like having only a portion of the Land Girl. It was pointed out to me that if I took a job with Mrs. Batley, the situation would be improved from everybody’s point of view. Mrs. Batley would then possess a Land Worker; I should have found a job; and Margot herself would be able to monopolize the whole, and not merely a section, of the Land Girl’s services.

  To me it appeared obvious that this must be the career for which Providence had intended me. Fortunately I knew something about gardening, having had charge of the grounds for a time while I was still behind the grilles. I therefore fell in with the excellent plan suggested by my cousins and, by six o’clock the following evening, the thing was done.

  Margot very kindly undertook all the arrangements.

  Though I was beyond the age-limit of the Land Army, I was none the less hired out according to their regulations and rules. This simplified things considerably.

  It appeared that my services were to be divided between Mrs. Batley and her friend, Mrs. Cornish, whose house was just across the road. Four days a week I was the henchwoman of Mrs. Batley; the remaining two days were Mrs. Cornish’s affair. I was to board with the latter. My pay would be the official Land Army wage—one pound eighteen shillings a week—of which a pound would go to Mrs. Cornish for my keep.

  My duties, it appeared, would be many and distinctly various.

  Mrs. Batley’s vegetable garden was her great preoccupation. She also had a car, which would certainly require cleaning from time to time. And in the depths of an old disused well outside the kitchen, a petrol-driven pump lurked, dreadful as a dragon. It was a bad starter, Margot said. The Land Girl sometimes had no end of a job to get it going on Sundays before she went to church.

  Moreover, Mrs. Cornish possessed a cow. On such days as I whisked temporarily into her service from that of Mrs. Batley, it was quite conceivable that she might give orders for this animal to be milked. Margot insisted that I must be prepared for any and every possibility.

  It was Adams, the Baldwins’ chauffeur—a most prosperous gentleman—who initiated me into the mysteries of how a car should be cleaned. Both he and Aunt Cissie’s maid—the inimitable Ridler—took a keen interest in my future, and were very good friends to me later on, as I shall presently relate.

  The lesson took place in the stable yard. I wore, for the first time, the outfit which Margot had procured for me (most of it was presented to me by my cousins)—corduroy breeches, a pullover, a sou’-wester and a large pair of Wellington boots. There was also a waterproof of vast dimensions in which the wearer resembled nothing so much as a barrage balloon.

  I endeavoured to do what was required of me. But I was curiously unskilful. The life I had led seemed to have made me unfitted for active work of any kind.

  I still have the paper on which Adams wrote out for me the classic method: (1) brush, (2) dust, (3) slosh, (4) dry, (5) polish—by which the best results are supposed to be obtained.

  Before actually entering into bondage, I went from Astley to spend a fortnight with relations who had a country house not far from Hereford.

  My recollections of that visit are chiefly of my agitated journey (try as I would, I could not overcome my alarm at having to change so often at stations which had no names); of the war news, which grew daily more depressing and humiliating; of the excellence of the Herefordshire cider; and of being taught to milk a cow.

  I have never liked cows. The two I frequented were obstructionist and disobliging. They made not the slightest attempt to co-operate. One of them had a nasty way of squinting round at me while the milking was in progress, giving short, sharp, slightly hysterical shudders all over her body if I so much as brushed her side. The other was more difficult to deal with, for she turned off her taps at the main immediately I sat down to the pail.

  Ten minutes or so of this rhythmic squeezing usually made my wrist muscles ache so agonizingly that I was obliged to leave off. The cowman—a kindly, weather-beaten creature with eyes the colour of a kingfisher—would stand by, sympathetically criticizing my technique. The pain in my wrists, he assured me, would continue until my muscles hardened. So I just had to set my teeth and return to the assault.

  Even in February, Hereford was exquisite. I went for long country walks in deep lanes, under low skies of watchet-blue and mother-o’-pearl. Hereford city itself gave me an odd impression: its romantic Saxon and Norman background seemed a curious setting for the crowds of soldiers—British, Indian, Canadian—and the swarms of war-workers from neighbouring factories who thronged its streets.

  On the whole—apart, of course, from the lessons in milking—I can’t see that my stay there did much to enlarge my Experience of Life. Like most dwellers in the country, my aunt and uncle were reduced by the petrol shortage to something not unlike the condition of people marooned upon a lonely isle.

  (3)

  Whenever possible, I make a point of avoiding very tiny women.

  I have observed tendencies in them which alarm me. They interfere. They are inclined to bully. Most of them—probably to compensate for what they lack in stature—seem to be endowed with an overwhelming sense of their own superiority. Also, they are inclined to talk too much—and a great deal too noisily—for their size.

  Mrs. Batley, though diminutive, was fortunately free from these failings. She did not flaunt her very remarkable efficiency; she was rather quiet, and I never heard her compare herself other than unfavourably with anyone else. It was quite by chance that I discovered that she held the office of churchwarden and counted the offertory after the Sunday collection had been made in church. After that, my admiration for her gifts became positively slavish. (As a child, I myself had so detested arithmetic that I had refused to learn it, and have been paying the penalty of those who can only do addition on their fingers ever since.)

  Everything about her was neat, precise, and methodical. The house and garden had to be just so and no otherwise. Had she a fault—though God forfend that I should suggest it!—it might have been a tendency to exact from the unforgiving minute just over sixty seconds’ worth of distance run. That, however, was merely the outcome of her thoroughness.

  The only time I ever saw her angry—and then she really flamed with indignation—was when I once neglected to shake the earth sufficiently from a tuft of freshly uprooted grass.

  ‘An egregious way of weeding!’ she
wrathfully exclaimed. ‘There ought not to be a particle of soil left on the roots!’

  She bent and shook the grass-tuft as an angry terrier shakes a rat.

  Land work, unless you are built on a rather particular pattern, is not specially interesting. I will not, therefore, trouble you with details of celery-lifting or the culture of the artichoke. Actually, I knew very little about vegetable-growing, having only had charge of the flower-garden when I was a nun. And there is a vast difference between the aesthetic sensations induced by the culture of roses and delphiniums and the utilitarian angle from which one observes the development of turnips and brussels sprouts.

  Fortunately, Mrs. Batley—have I not said that she was efficient?—had learnt a surprising amount on her own since the war began. Her method was to study the publications of the Ministry of Agriculture, to ask questions, to make experiments, and to use her common sense. The results were phenomenal.

  My working-day began at half-past six. When I had ‘done’ my room, I breakfasted in the kitchen with Mrs. Cornish’s maid. I then went forth into the marvellous cold stillness of the winter dawn.

  Astley Town—which was the curious name of the lovely black-and-white timbered farm-house where Mrs. Batley lived—stood in a hollow with flower-beds set in a lawn in front of it, and a steep vegetable-garden on the slope behind. There were orchards, and a little wood, and a big ploughed field, and the curve of the road all round it; deep in the country, it was about as characteristic a corner of Worcestershire as you could find.

  Sometimes, when I arrived in the early morning, the whole place would be shrouded in delicate veils of ghost-coloured mist. It was like walking down into the heart of a dream in which the house slept, dim and unreal—a phantom house, charged with quiet little rather uninteresting memories of bygone days. It did not strike me as being a particularly happy house. It was too cold. Its atmosphere was reticent; it kept itself to itself. I did what I could to be friendly, but it was no use. It didn’t like me. I felt this keenly. It is extraordinarily humiliating to be snubbed persistently by a house.

  I used to begin by cleaning the row of shoes that were waiting for me in the scullery. After that, a scuttleful of yesterday’s ashes had to be carried out and shaken through a sieve on to the ash-heap near the barn. If there happened to be a wind, you were smothered in powdery grey dust; if it rained, the dust merely thickened into a curiously adhesive species of mud. Sometimes there was coal to be brought in from the outside dump as well.

  Usually I was then met by kind Sarah, who lived with Mrs. Batley, and who told me what vegetables were needed for the day.

  Nobody who has not actually fingered one can have any idea of the degree of iciness to which a brussels sprout can attain if it really makes up its mind; nor of the rapidity with which this iciness can be communicated to the hands of anyone who attempts to sever it from the parent stalk at half-past eight on a cold and frosty morning in the early days of March. By the time I had gathered a basketful of the things, my fingers were blue and stiff. I could have yelled with pain.

  So, to warm myself up, I used to repair to the woodshed.

  Chopping wood is one of the most heating occupations I know. It is also quite amusing—if the wood is of the kind that allows itself to be chopped. The splinters fly merrily to the four corners of the woodshed: the severed pieces leap up and hit you on the ankles or crack you savagely across the nose. The very block skids wildly off beneath the blows of the hatchet, so that quite as much time is spent in gathering up the fragments as in actually doing the job.

  Usually, after three-quarters of an hour of this, I was too exhausted to continue. It was about this time that Mrs. Batley generally appeared.

  The moment Mrs. Batley became visible on the horizon, everything in the garden immediately began to hum.

  I can’t imagine how she did it. I suppose she just happened to be that sort of person. For, no matter how vigorously you might have been working, one glimpse of that small silhouette, even in the distance, galvanized you into an even more terrific output of activity.

  Never shall I forget the hectic energy with which I staggered up and down that garden path with a barrow full of ashes to be used for road repairs; or my endless to-ings and fro-ings from the bean-bed to the toolshed, struggling to carry four dangerously wobbling cloches with but a single pair of hands; or my panda-like ascent to the loft above the woodshed for a sack of hop-manure that burst all over me as I descended with it hoisted on my back; or my leaps and prancings on the summit of the compost heap, with Mrs. Batley at my elbow to remind me that On No Account Must the Contours of the Corners Be Destroyed; or—seared into my memory for all eternity—the long hours spent in the frightful and back-breaking occupation of digging the rich, moist, chocolate-coloured, and incredibly heavy Worcestershire soil….

  ‘I do hope that digging isn’t going to be too much for you!’ Mrs. Batley would sometimes say when, on the stroke of one, I straightened out my long back, scraped the clods of earth from my boots with the edge of my spade and turned my crimson and shining nose towards where my long-yearned-for lunch was awaiting me at Mrs. Cornish’s.

  Naturally (I was usually half-way up the lane by this time) I only laughed and assured her—over my shoulder—that, on the contrary, I rather liked it.

  What else could one do? There was a war on. And anyhow, what was the use of taking a job as a land-worker if you hadn’t sufficient strength in your miserable body to use a spade?

  (4)

  I should here like to pause for a moment, in order to introduce you to Mrs. Cornish. After meeting her, you will, in all probability, be annoyed with me for not having done so before.

  There is a fairy-tale by George Macdonald—is it The Princess and the Goblins?—about a king’s daughter who, in her father’s palace, found a room at the top of a secret stair. In this room dwelt a lady with snow-white hair and eyes that were younger than the springtime. White pigeons flew in to her from the windows and nestled on her shoulders; and in a deep furnace-pool were flame-waves, like petals in the heart of an enchanted rose.

  Well, the moment I set eyes on Mrs. Cornish, I knew immediately that the pigeons and the roses could not be far away.

  As it happened, I was perfectly right. She was what I believe is called a Nature Mystic. She knew all the ways and secrets of the hills and trees and fields and shrubs and flowers. Blackbirds perched on her fingers. Larks flew to her out of the sky. She knew, I think, all that there was to be known about dogs and horses. I could never make up my mind whether there was more in her of St. Francis of Assisi or of Pan. She had read widely, thought deeply, lived intensely: as a result, her mind was a storehouse filled with lovely and unexpected things. To me, perhaps the most surprising thing about her was her deep and absorbing passion for Jersey cows.

  The first time she took me into her charming garden—like her house, every inch of it had been planned and designed by herself—she pointed out to me a large gap in the hedge. She had actually caused a piece of it to be removed in order that she might enjoy an uninterrupted view of the daily doings of her favourite cow. To her, stock-breeding held very much the place that politics do to a Prime Minister. I doubt whether there was anything she didn’t know about it. If there was, it would have gone comfortably on to the back of the proverbial—and now extinct—threepenny bit.

  Mrs. Cornish was responsible for a good deal more of my education than she will ever realize. In the evenings, I often sat with her in her bedroom. She was a great sufferer, and obliged to spend a large part of her time in bed. One would have to be at least as clever as she was to give any idea of the charm and interest of her conversation. Tired as I generally was, I much preferred listening to her to retiring to the rest for which my body craved.

  She loved reading. She introduced me to Agatha Christie and Mr. Fortune; she also read aloud to me Norah Waln’s exquisite House of Exile and lent me the works of her kinsman, Siegfried Sassoon. From her, too, I first heard of Peter Scott and
learned to appreciate his marvellous paintings of waterfowl in flight.

  It still puzzles me how anyone who had lived so much dans le monde could still remain so untouched by it. She was utterly incapable of any of those unpleasant things one associates with ‘worldliness’—small meannesses, snobbishness, love of this world’s goods, an unkind tongue. Everything about her was not only noble but beautiful. And I will conclude this slightly alarming catalogue of virtues by mentioning that her sense of humour was as keen and ironic as it was irrepressible.

  I tear myself with difficulty from the delightful task of contemplating Mrs. Cornish. I am not at all sure that she was not the best chapter in my Book of Exodus.

  Once, for five days, it froze so hard that it was impossible to do anything in the garden.

  That week, Mrs. Batley used me as her Inside Woman instead of her Outside Man.

  I swept floors. I brushed and dusted furniture. I cleaned windows. I polished brass. I took up carpets and laid them down again. And I was just beginning to recover from the general state of invertebracy engendered by these activities when the snow came.

  There are two angles from which snow can be regarded.

  One is the angle of people like Francis Thompson and Walter de la Mare, who sit and look at it, and then write poetry. The other is the angle of people like myself, who have to sweep.

  Nobody, unless they had actually tried it, could imagine from its exquisitely feathery appearance what heavy stuff snow is to shift—especially after the first three-quarters of an hour. After clearing the courtyard, the drive and a path or two in the garden, I used to have bets with myself as to whether my arms would drop off before my back broke, or the other way round.

  When at last the thaw set in, I could have shouted for joy.