Growing Up

by Angela Thirkell

  “Poor Leslie,” said Lady Waring. “Yes, she overworked for two years with hardly any break and then she was asked to go to America to speak about her work and the second time she was torpedoed coming back and in a boat for two days.”

  “No wonder she doesn’t look well,” said Lydia.

  “And I think, though I wouldn’t say this to my husband and I know you will keep it to yourself, that she worries more about her brother because of what she went through. When George was killed,” said Lady Waring, “it was far worse for his father than for me. For me George went when his leave was up and didn’t come back. That was hard. But my husband had been in France and knew exactly what it was like and what George might have felt.”

  Lydia was silent.

  “I don’t want to make you think that it is serious,” said Lady Waring, taking her silence for a wish to avoid too painful a subject. “She will get over it when she is better.”

  “It wasn’t that,” said Lydia. “I was thinking about Colin—that’s my special brother. I was thinking when he goes abroad and gets killed I can never know what it felt like.”

  Lady Waring looked at her guest and saw that she was suddenly and deeply moved.

  “If you can amuse Leslie, it will be the best thing in the world for her,” she said. “Dr. Ford says it is simply a question of time.”

  Lydia looked gratefully at her.

  “I am so sorry about your brother, my dear,” Lady Waring said. “And now we must really hurry, or we shall be late for lunch. I oughtn’t to have let Nannie keep us so long, but she does love talking about her babies.”

  Leslie Waring made her appearance at the lunch table, looking better for a long morning in bed and ten minutes’ walk. During the meal she asked Sir Harry if she and Lydia might take the pony-cart for a little drive. Her aunt looked anxious, but contented herself by saying that they must go out soon after lunch and be back by four at the very latest, as it was such a nasty day. Sir Harry, who had enjoyed his walk back with Noel, offered to take him round the woods and introduce him to Jasper, so that he could walk where he liked without question. Noel, who had had from Lydia a rapid sketch of Leslie’s adventures and illness, thought Miss Waring could have no better medicine than his wife’s company and accepted Sir Harry’s invitation with pleasure, which left Lady Waring free to write her letters and do the thousand and one things that made up her busy life.

  By the end of lunch a pale sun had struggled through the mist, so Lady Waring felt less misgiving when Leslie and Lydia went off together, carrying rugs. Leslie led the way to the stables where a stout pony with a small head was standing in a loose box thinking of nothing at all. The whole stable spoke eloquently of changed times. Where hunters and driving horses had champed and stamped, old mowing machines, mysterious wooden boxes, iron bedsteads and deal chests-of-drawers removed from the servants’ wing, a couple of baths left by the contractors till needed, a rusty kitchen range, chicken meal, a bath-chair, a giant weighing machine and twenty other pieces of now useless furniture were stored, dating from different epochs in the history of the Priory. The bath-chair, or rather invalid’s chair, which the occupier could propel by laboriously turning two wooden rims outside the wheels (a description which will be absolutely unintelligible except to those who have such a chair in their memory), had been bought for an aunt of Sir Harry’s. She, being the unmarried daughter left at home to look after her old parents, had found it advisable to lose the use of both her legs at about forty. Sir Harry’s childhood had been terrorized by the chair and his aunt. Cecil and Leslie Waring had pushed, pulled and propelled themselves and each other, sometimes into the lily pond, sometimes down the terrace steps, sometimes down the long passage from the house to the kitchen, driving footmen with trays nearly demented. On the weighing machine which used to stand in the hall, a monstrous structure with a padded mahogany chair at one end of a brass beam and a bowl for giant weights at the other, they had weighed themselves, their nurse, the dogs, any maidservants they could catch and, once, the butler. A stuffed pike in a glass case, degraded from billiard room to steward’s room, thence to boot and knife room, was in a manger, and a dressmaker’s dummy, known to Cecil and Leslie as Mrs. Grabham, from the name of her maker, stood with firm, well-developed bust and hips, and a kind of cage for a skirt, in a corner.

  The only living inhabitants were the pony and a cat who liked to live there and pretend she was an outcast, though the gardener’s children to whom she belonged spent all their spare time bringing her and her frequent families back to their cottage.

  “Hullo, Crumpet,” said Leslie, addressing the pony, who turned his small head and looked at her. “Come out.”

  She opened the door and Crumpet walked neatly out. Leslie, with Lydia’s help, took his harness from the wall, dressed him, and led him to the coach-house, which was packed with furniture from the big house under dust-sheets. At one end was a governess cart, which must have been a smart turn-out in its time. Leslie backed Crumpet into it, fastened the harness, and led the equipage into the stable yard.

  “Would you like to drive?” said Leslie.

  Lydia said would Leslie drive first as she knew where they were going, so Leslie took the reins, Lydia got in opposite her, and Crumpet trotted in a leisurely yet nimble fashion down the back drive. The once neat surface was green with moss and weeds, littered with damp twigs and rotting leaves, and when Leslie turned down a drive into the woods the sound of the pony’s feet and the wheels was no more deadened than it had been on the metalled road. At the top of a little rise Leslie stopped the pony. Before them the drive dipped and rose again with a misty perspective of trees. At the far end a tapering column gilded by the low sun closed the view.

  “Obelisk,” said Leslie, pointing with her whip, “erected by my great-grandfather, Uncle Harry’s grandfather, Lord knows why. It used to have a gilded ball on top, but the gilding faded and last year the ball fell down and Uncle Harry can’t get it put up again, so there is only a rusty spike. All very sad.”

  “I know,” said Lydia, looking wistfully down the long vista to the obelisk. “We had a stone figure at the end of the terrace at my old home and last time I went there the pedestal had split and the little statue had fallen down, and the business people the house is let to didn’t care.”

  “It must be rotten for you to have your old home let,” said Leslie. “We’d better get our wood or Aunt Harriet will begin to think I am dead. She is rather given that way.”

  She got out and showed Lydia a heap of dead branches, roughly chopped into lengths.

  “Jasper’s wood-pile,” she said. “He brings them up in the cart when he has time, so I always help him when I’m here.”

  She produced some cord and began to collect branches.

  “That’s awfully bad for you,” said Lydia. “I’ll stack them and you can tie them up and I’ll put them in the trap.”

  Leslie looked up, but apparently did not resent this interference. Lydia made neat piles of wood, reft the cord from Leslie’s hands in a kind, business-like way, carried the bundles to the cart and came back for more.

  “We can’t manage all this,” she said, “but if I leave it by the road we can fetch it another time.”

  She beat the dirt and bits of bark from her hands and clothes vigorously and shook herself. Leslie, looking at her handsome face flushed with the exercise and her violent, free movements, suddenly felt very envious, which so affected her that she sat down on a log, looking very tired.

  “Here, you’ll get green marks all over your skirt if you sit there,” said Lydia. “Are you feeling queer? I oughtn’t to have let you tie up that last bundle.”

  “Well, they are my bundles—at least, Uncle Harry’s,” said Leslie with the unreasonable perversity of fatigue.

  A retort sprang to Lydia’s lips, but remembering that she was a guest and Leslie an invalid, she said nothing, looking at her with anxious compassion.

  “I apologize,” said Leslie after a brief
silence. “I suddenly got rather cross because you can do so much and I can’t do anything now. Can’t keep my job; can’t even keep my temper.”

  “Rot!” exclaimed Mrs. Merton, becoming again for a moment Miss Lydia Keith. “Look here, you get into the cart and I’ll drive for a bit. You look cold.”

  Leslie obediently got up, walked silently to the pony-cart and got in. Lydia tucked one rug in a business-like way round her companion’s legs, put the other rug round her shoulders, loaded the faggots onto the cart, exchanged a word with Crumpet, climbed in over the wood and turned the pony towards home.

  “Along that drive to the left,” said Leslie. “We’ll go by Golden Valley.”

  Lydia turned as she was told.

  “I am normal now,” said Leslie. “Thank you.”

  “But you always were normal,” said Lydia, letting Crumpet drop, not unwillingly, to a walk. “If you knew how low and wormish you make me feel.”

  “I?” said Leslie, in extreme surprise.

  “Well, you’ve held down a very difficult, important job, though I don’t know what it was, for years,” said Lydia, “and you’ve been to America twice to help the government, and you’ve been torpedoed, and your brother is at sea, which is enough to make anyone worry, and I think you are simply splendid. I’ve done absolutely nothing at all except bits of V.A.D. and land work and working parties and all that sort of easy stuff. Every time I thought I’d found a job Noel was moved on again and by the time we had moved everyone had lost interest in me. I know everyone says, why aren’t I called up, but if I said I hadn’t had any luck yet no one would believe me. Anyway, I shall try again.”

  “Do you mean get a job and leave your husband?” said Leslie.

  “I suppose that’s what it boils down to,” said Lydia, looking straight in front of her. “It would be quite ghastly as long as Noel is in England. Of course when he is sent abroad again nothing will matter. But somehow if one is happy one feels one isn’t really helping the war, and I am so very happy, except when I think how wormish I am and really almost a Traitor,” said Lydia knitting her brows.

  Leslie could not think what to say. Of one thing she felt quite certain, that Lydia was being unfair to herself. What Lydia had done in the way of war work she did not know, nor did Lydia’s contemptuous reference to easy stuff give her any real information. But in her job she had learnt to wait before judging people and to get sidelights when possible.

  “Now to the right,” she said, “and we’ll see if Jasper is in.”

  Lydia turned Crumpet’s head to the right, into a lane that crossed the drive. Inspirited by the sound of his own hoofs on the road the pony tossed his head and broke into a smart trot. A couple of hundred yards further on they came to a cottage over-towered by a large pear-tree. In front of it was a vegetable garden where Jasper was digging. He looked up as they approached. Crumpet recognizing him stopped abruptly and jerking his head forward began to tear at a few scanty blades of grass under the hedge in a manner expressive of starvation and ill-treatment.

  “Hullo, old Crumpet,” said Jasper, straightening up and sticking his fork into the ground, “you’re a nice little old pony, aren’t you.”

  Crumpet tearing away at the grass and two withered nettles paid no attention.

  “Good afternoon, Jasper,” said Leslie. “I’ve brought a friend with me who is staying at the Priory. Can I bring her in to see your cottage?”

  Jasper leant his arms on the top of his gate and surveyed the cart and its occupants with an unwinking stare.

  “If Crumpet’ll stand,” he remarked after a pause.

  Taking this as an invitation, Leslie opened the little back door of the pony-cart and prepared to descend.

  “That’s a fine lot of wood you young ladies has got,” said Jasper admiringly, “but you don’t want mucking up old Crumpet’s trap with all that. I’ll bring it up to-morrow in the cart.”

  He came out of the gate, took the faggots out of the trap and piled them by the hedge. The young women got out. Jasper pulled a piece of cord from his pocket and hobbled the pony.

  “No good a-hitching the reins on my old thorns,” he said. “Only scratches the leather. You’ll be safe enough now, old Crumpet. You won’t go straying away.”

  He strode up the path, followed by his guests.

  The cottage, which was so Early English Water Colour as to be almost incredible, stood below a hanger, a small stream purling beside it. The walls were of a kind of wattle and daub, of a creamy colour, the roof was thatched, the windows latticed and very small. A deserted pigsty leaned drunkenly at its side, a well was near the pigsty with a bucket standing on its stone rim. There was, quite unbelievably, a bench before the little porch. A thin plume of blue smoke rose lazily from the chimney. A gun and a fishing-rod stood against the white-washed wall of the porch. Jasper, with his autumn leaf coloured coat, breeches and leggings, almost melted into his surroundings.

  Owing to its position the cottage suffered from every conceivable drawback of picturesque rural life. The hanger prevented any sun from reaching it except in the late evenings of midsummer when it is almost in the north. The purling brook overflowed every spring and autumn, leaving mud and old leaves all over the garden and sometimes in the cottage. The well was apt to run dry or at other times produced water with a peculiar and unpleasant taste, attributed by Jasper and the older men to they old monks at Beliers Abbey in a general way. The windows let in draughts and kept out what light there was and the pigsty, although untenanted since pig-control came in, still smelt of Domesday swine kept by the Margetts of that time, who thought but poorly of foreigners.

  Again and again Sir Harry had tried to put Jasper into a better cottage. Jasper, more than half-gipsy in nature if not by blood, cherished his solitude and his independence of newfangled contraptions. Electric light, water laid on, the neighbourhood of shops, the companionship of his kind except at the Sheep’s Head, were suspect in his mind. His well gave water which he had drunk all his life and when it ran dry the stream, analysed as ninety per cent fatal to humans, was there. A tin of paraffin supplied his lamp. Bread and a few groceries he bought once a week in the village, milk he got from Sir Harry’s farm, potatoes and herbs he grew, game could be got in some shape all the year round by a man who knew how, for newspapers he had no need and probably could not have read them. He knew no one that he wanted to write to and in any case had forgotten so much of the art as he learned while forced to attend the village school. As for the wireless, he felt great contempt for people who could listen to what he called, though in less refined terms, an old box of tricks, when, as he said, it stood to reason you couldn’t hear no further than what your own ears heard, and his were sharp enough; and indeed they were, as the local poachers knew. When Cecil and Leslie Waring were little, they were convinced that Jasper’s cottage was really old Jacob Armitage’s cottage in The Children of the New Forest, and longed for the Priory to be burned down by the Roundheads, so that they could go and stay there.

  His one room, which was kitchen, living-room and everything except bedroom, for a little wooden stair in the wall led to an attic above where he slept, was now almost dark. Jasper courteously brought forward two rush-seated chairs, made by his Romany kin years before, and sat down at the other side of the table. Lydia looked round, a little daunted, but much interested. As her eyes got used to the gloom she saw that the walls were almost covered with skins of vermin, and the dry corpses of others hung in bunches as onions or bits of bacon might hang in a more normal kitchen. A black pot was cooking on the fire, giving out a smell that reminded her of the gipsy’s stew that Mr. Toad partook of.

  “Seed my old grandmother last night, Miss Leslie,” said Jasper, who was occupying his fingers by making a snare.

  “How was she?” said Leslie. “Jasper’s grandmother,” she explained to Lydia, “was a witch.”

  “All right, old granny was,” said Jasper. “I was down at the big Dipping Pond, laying for some of those lads
as come over from the camp. Poor lot they are. Make enough noise to scare every old rabbit on the place. And there was a big black hare, as plain as you are.”

  “Did she see you?” said Leslie.

  “See me?” said Jasper with a sardonic laugh. “Old granny seed me all right. Sat up as bold as brass, looking at me. I was just going to have a shot at her, when two of those lads came out of the coppice and scared her away. I gave them both a proper old hiding and they won’t come again in a hurry.”

  Lydia listened with serious attention, fascinated and hardly believing her ears.

  “Jasper’s grandmother died sixty years ago, so it is quite troublesome of her to come back like this,” said Leslie with an air of courteous explanation.

  “But would you really shoot her?” Lydia asked, a little afraid of offending her host.

  “Yes, miss. I’d shoot old granny if I could get her,” said Jasper. “I’d learn her not to rest quiet in her grave. But I’ve never got her yet.”

  “Some people,” said Lydia, “say you can’t shoot witches except with a silver button.”

  She waited nervously for Jasper to take offence, but he appeared to consider her remark worth attention.

  “Yes, I have heard tell as an old silver button is the thing,” said Jasper. “Thank you, miss. If I find a silver button I’ll mind what you said. But they aren’t as common as all that.”

  So carried away was Lydia by the events of the afternoon, the twilit room, the general feeling of mystery and even sorcery, that she said, almost without meaning to:

  “I’m sure I’ve got a silver button somewhere, if you’d like one.”

  It was now so dark in the room that she could not see Jasper’s face, and before he could answer Sir Harry’s voice was heard outside. They all went into the garden and found Sir Harry and Noel, who had been for a long walk and were taking Jasper on their way home. Noel was formally presented to Jasper, who appeared to feel well disposed towards him and offered him the freedom of Sir Harry’s woods and fields. His taciturnity then descended upon him again like a cloud. Crumpet was released, Leslie got into the cart and the others said they would walk beside her.