Broken Music

by Marjorie Eccles

  In a small village like Broughton Underhill, where nearly everyone was someone else’s sister, parent, brother-in-law or cousin twice removed, newcomers were of intense interest and the Wentworths were at first objects of much speculation. Francis was, in fact, remembered by many as a frequent visitor to Oaklands, as a child and later, when he had spent weekends there taking part in the shoots, both before and after his marriage, and when word got around that he was in holy orders, it was believed that he was there to offer assistance to the ailing Father Dorkings and to be ready to step into his shoes when he retired. Instead, here they had a clergyman who rarely darkened the doors of the church, and never ministered; a gentleman who was obviously of somewhat straitened means, yet who was not visibly employed. His tall figure soon became a familiar sight, tramping interminable miles over the hills, that great woolly sheepdog at his heels, and eventually it came to be accepted that he was unlikely to be seen much in church, alongside the rest of his family. Mrs Villiers saw to it that they, at least, attended the services every Sunday. The children were often about the village, where they were liked for their unaffected manners, especially little Amy, who chattered to everyone and was given sweets and patted on the head because she looked so pretty.

  Eunice, with whom the girls now shared lessons, was pretty too, a sweet-natured creature, but so shy and timid with anyone she didn’t know well, it was painful to watch. She was a delicate little girl who suffered from a bad chest and indeed looked as if a puff of wind would blow her away. Grev they only saw when he was home from Shrewsbury. An intense boy, very highly strung, his dark eyes too big for his pale face, he was doted on by his mother. Funny Grev, people said, so odd, but so talented. He was always playing some musical instrument or other – the piano, or the cello, or whatever his fancy had settled on at that particular time – and had already decided what he was going to be when he grew up: Greville Foley, composer, he told them, matter-of-factly. He was constantly scribbling at little pieces of music he was creating and became impatient with his sister and Nella when Marianne alone showed any enthusiasm for being allowed to play these with him. All three girls were of course taught the piano as a necessary accomplishment for young ladies by Miss Osgood, but Marianne was the only one who persevered beyond practising scales and learning to play simple pieces.

  Mrs Villiers had once hoped Francis would find his salvation in marrying again, but that hope soon perished, though salvation of a sort did come when Father Dorkings, growing more frail, managed to persuade Francis (though only Father Dorkings knew how) to assist him in the parish, acting as a sort of unofficial curate, until someone could be found to take the old rector’s place so that he could retire. However, no other clergyman could be persuaded to accept a living where the rectory was occupied by someone else, and this unsatisfactory situation – to Eleanor at least – continued, though Francis gave no indication as to whether he found it so or not.

  But all that was before the war. A war which had begun in some obscure corner of Europe and gathered momentum until it involved the whole world, changed the face of Europe and wiped out a whole generation of young men. Yet, even when it was over, after four long years, and peace had come at last, there was no question for the Wentworth family of returning to life as it had been…that life had ended abruptly, gone for ever, with a tragedy that had nothing to do with the war.

  Life as they knew it had ended on that cataclysmic day at the beginning of August, in 1914, when the world was already swinging crazily round on its axis, out of control, as if it were the great lump of clay Joel Rafferty threw on his potter’s wheel before getting it centred and shaping it into submission. Such a clamour, an upheaval, so many things happening at once. The country turning to preparations for war and all that entailed. The huge thunderstorm that night, like a prelude to the thunder that would presently roll over Europe. All of which had seemed at that time almost an irrelevance, shocking as that might seem now, of less importance then than the personal calamity which had altered the lives of the Wentworths for ever.

  The day they had lost Marianne. The day the music stopped.

  Chapter Three

  1914

  But the world did not stop. Marianne had gone, for ever, but the world rumbled on, the war gathered momentum. And in the end there was no question, as far as Nella was concerned, of staying meekly at home while every young man of her acquaintance was marching off to war, eager to defend poor little Belgium from its arrogant invaders, the Germans, who had marched through neutral territory on their way to northern France and thus to Paris. Since she was prevented by her sex from beoming a soldier, she had done the next best thing and taken herself off to enlist as a VAD nurse. She had screwed up her hair, put on a severe felt hat ‘borrowed’ from Florrie, and added years to her age in order to appear old enough to serve in France when she’d completed her training, and though she knew the doctor signing her up had not believed her, the shortage of nurses, plus her earnestness and determination, must have carried her through.

  She began her training in a big London teaching hospital where she learnt that windows must be opened three inches during the day and two at night, and to straighten the castors of beds so that they were not a quarter of an inch out of line, that a speck of dust was a sin, to make hospital corners when tucking in the sheets, and to obey Sister at all times. She did not see a wounded soldier until troop trains arrived bringing the hundreds of wounded and dying men from the battlefield they called the Somme.

  Enormous as the shock of this was, it did not prepare her for what she encountered when she was sent overseas to nurse the casualties there. 1916. Flanders. Plunged straight into the thick of it with her fellow nurses, there she had the first taste of what war really meant.

  ‘Dear Father, Grandy and Amy,

  Well, here I am at last, on active service, after a seasick crossing over the Channel which I will not upset you by describing. I have been assigned to a camp hospital, comprising long lines of camouflaged marquees which serve as wards, with tarpaulin passages connecting them. I am billeted in a bell tent with my friend, Daisy Musgrave. (You remember her, my fellow VAD who trained with me in London.) It’s all very military, but our tents are quickly becoming our home, with all our own things around us.

  Like everyone else, I have brought too many clothes and personal possessions with me, though no doubt there will come a time when I shall be very glad to get out of uniform and into civvies for visiting the town when I’m off duty. Daisy has carted a gramophone with her everywhere, through thick and thin. She plays the latest dance music all the time and teaches me all the newest steps.

  Don’t worry about me – we are well fed and watched over and chaperoned within an inch of our lives. We thought the hospital rules in London were strict but that was nothing to what they are here!

  To keep up the morale of the men, there are concerts and sing-songs which we nurses are graciously allowed to attend, and jollifications organised for the men who are well enough, often with soldier dancing comically with soldier at these, because nurses must not partner them. Nurses must not dance with other nurses, either…nurses must not wear their own fur collars around their necks to keep out the icy wind as they run from their tents to the wards…nurses must not, ever, consort in public with officers…nurses must be saints, not human beings. So you can see how difficult this must be for me!

  I am lucky to be bunking up with Daisy. She’s awfully nice, such fun and never grumbles, though this nurse’s life she has chosen is harder for her than for most, since she comes from a very grand family, and has never before needed to lift a finger to help herself. (Unlike me, with a sensible grandmama who has always brought us up to be useful around the house; thank you, Grandy!) She is very pretty and has lovely thick fair hair which is a great trial to her and keeps slipping down because she’s always had a maid to pin it up properly before. But she never minds when she has to do the jobs everyone hates, and she’s better than anybody at keeping the boys�
�� spirits up. They call her Sister Sunshine.

  We VADs are all known to the Tommies as ‘sister’, much to the fury of the pukka, qualified sisters, which must be galling for them, after all. Their rank is very important to them, after the years of training, hard work and little pay they’ve had to endure to reach it. They keep up their self-importance by ordering us about as if we were children, and not very intelligent ones at that, but we are used to this by now and most of them relent when they get to know us. “Your assistance is not without its drawbacks, Miss Wentworth,” was all Sister Johnson said to me when I dropped and broke a syringe the other day.’

  In the letters home which Nella wrote for those Tommies who were not able to write for themselves, they spoke jokingly of the rain, rain, rain, which would not drain away in this low-lying land, and played down how it filled with mud the bomb craters, and the overflowing trenches they were compelled to fight in; they did not mention that men, guns and horses were regularly drowned in the thick ooze, and did not speak of the horrific wounds and the deaths of their comrades; nor of the stink of death and corruption from unclaimed, unburied bodies, and the latrines which could be smelt half a mile away.

  And neither did Nella mention the shock which had awaited her and her fellow volunteers. She was only one of the many young, half-trained girls, for the most part gently raised, living previously sheltered lives, most of whom had never even seen a half-dressed man before, never mind a naked male body. Having to do for them the intimate things which might help them to survive, nursing the sick and wounded in improvised, primitive and often filthy conditions which would have horrified the strict training hospitals they had so recently left. Cutting off mud-caked uniforms before they should set like cement, in order to tend stinking, gangrenous wounds and horrifying internal injuries, dressing the stumps of limbs lost by red-hot shrapnel, which could slice through an arm or a leg as easily as a piece of spaghetti; it all became second nature.

  ‘But I’ve left my best bit of news until last,’ she had concluded that first letter. ‘Grev is working here, too! Can you imagine how astonished we both were – me, especially? He was the last person I expected to see.’

  In one of those happenings which are called coincidences, but which happened all the time in the random chaos of this war, she and Greville Foley had found themselves working in the same unit, she nursing and Grev as a non-combatant stretcher-bearer, a job which earned the respect of everyone, since it meant plunging out into no-man’s-land in the thick of enemy fire to bring back the wounded and dying. Unarmed, not trained to use weapons or handle ammunition, their only defence a white brassard, or armband, with a scarlet cross on it.

  Chapter Four

  Now, four years later, and with the end of the war and Oaklands as a hospital ceasing to exist, Nella’s work as a nurse was coming to an end, and there was an alarming gap stretching in front of her, an emptiness she couldn’t think how she was going to fill.

  ‘Why don’t you carry on nursing, become qualified?’ Miss Inman had suggested. ‘We need more women of your calibre in the profession.’

  A life devoted to the alleviation of human suffering sounded worthy and lofty, and many of the other temporary nurses she had served with were seeking in it an escape from what might well now be a life of idle, enforced spinsterhood, but Nella didn’t feel that was justification enough. She had volunteered and done her duty willingly, and not only because she had found in it an antidote to the restlessness which had consumed her before the war. But now she was, in effect, back where she had started: even in those pre-war days she had upset a good many people by rejecting what she had seen as the aimless life projected for her, its sole object to get herself married as soon and as well as possible.

  Oaklands Park was a Queen Anne house built of brick that time had turned to a warm rose pink, in its approach looking smaller than it actually was, being tall and narrow at the front, flat-faced and shallow-roofed, four storeys high, but stretching out a long way towards the back. Wall shrubs spread out at its base, seeming to anchor the tall house to the ground and prevent it looking top-heavy, while climbing the walls were Virginia creeper and roses – Gloire de Dijon, Albertine, Zephirine Drouhin (a bad choice, this – a rose of a vibrant pink colour that clashed horribly with the brick, but kept because it was thornless, had a rich fragrance and bloomed continuously). Where the carriageway from the road ended, the hundred-yard-long drive began, running ruler straight towards the front steps between a double row of yews, with grass stretching either side behind them, in turn flanked by matching herbaceous borders against brick walls, until the drive swept into a circle round a central fountain and then continued round towards the back.

  Nella emerged from the back door with her usual haste, passed the stables and the carriage house now used to accommodate motor vehicles and ambulances, and made for the arched wooden door set in the old brick wall, struck anew by a glimpse of the disorderly aspect of the ornamental garden at the front. The borders were overgrown, with last year’s growth not cut back, the gravel was grass-grown and weed-infested; the roses on the walls, taking advantage of neglect, lolled unsupported and unpruned; the shaggy yews nearly touched each other, almost begging for their annual clip into the neat candle-flame shapes Lady Sybil had always been so particular about. Trimming them was a four-man-and-a-boy job and there was only Hughes and his garden boy now, where once there had been six men employed to look after the gardens, three of whom would never return.

  Hughes had left a basket of vegetables for her outside the potting shed. Despite all the odds, he’d managed to keep his kitchen garden in good shape. The glasshouses might be empty of the peaches, nectarines and grapes, the hothouse roses and stephanotis which had filled them before the war, but the neat rows of cabbages, potatoes and onions were what mattered now, and kept the family in fresh produce, with some to spare. Compared to those unlucky beings in the towns and cities, Broughton Underhill, accustomed to being self-sufficient, had never gone hungry in the wartime years; they’d never had to queue miserably for even the bare necessities as food became scarcer and dearer. Sugar and tea rationing had hit them as hard as everyone else, and meat and dairy produce had been commandeered by the government, but what farmer was going to deny his family and friends a bit of butter, enough milk? In one or two backyards the odd clandestine pig rooted, hidden from officialdom – while snaring rabbits and hares and taking a game bird or two for the pot was an inherited skill for some in Broughton, and easy enough when lame old Scuddy Thomas was the only help the head gamekeeper had, and they both turned a blind eye, anyway.

  Nella picked up the basket of parsnips and carrots and let herself out through the wicket gate that opened onto the ancient oak woods which had given the house its name. She hurried on, and as she reached the stile, the clock over the old stables chimed the half-hour and for a moment she hesitated, but then she climbed the stile steps and perched on the top rail, pulling her red-lined cloak around her. It wouldn’t hurt to snatch some time to herself.

  A strong, cold wind blew across the fields and she impatiently tucked back into the confines of her uniform cap some escaped strands of the slippery dark chestnut hair, less red than that their mother had passed on to all the rest of the family. Her mind jumped back again to what had happened this morning, when she’d first heard from matron the name of the doctor who would be arriving within the next day or two to replace the present MO, who was leaving the army for good. Captain AD Geddes. Duncan Geddes. Yes, of course it was him, no mistake. And in a world which had for so long been so very dark and grey, a secret warmth flooded her.

  She’d done her best to put the implications of his imminent arrival out of her mind while she worked, without conspicuous success, it had to be said. Panic touched her every time she thought of how she might react when they met. Even his name had stirred up feelings she thought she had controlled, despatched firmly into the past. What fate had sent him to Oaklands, of all places? Fate? Surely not. The thoug
ht that she might be working here must almost certainly have entered his mind.

  She gazed, seeing and yet not seeing the familiar view which had shone like a glimpse of remembered Heaven beyond the mud and devastation in Flanders: rolling pastures and meadowlands extending to the ha-ha which protected the gardens of Oaklands from wandering cattle; to the left the big house itself, the figures on the terrace made tiny by distance. A tranquil, timeless scene. Transformed in autumn by the gold and amber of beech and oak, the trees were as yet bare and leafless, waiting for the true spring and the haze of bluebells that would spread beneath their feet. The dying sun was low and red in a cold green sky. A white flock of seagulls had flown inland, beautiful in flight, raucous and screaming as they followed the plough, scavenging for worms and small creatures fleeing from the blades as the earth was turned. The rows were arrow straight, a matter of pride and habit for Harry Packer, who’d learnt to plough a furrow trudging with his father behind the huge and heavy, patient Cleveland bays when he was thirteen. Still going strong at eighty-two, he should have been enjoying a comfortable retirement by now, but like his old ’osses, was still in harness and proud to be so – ‘till the boys come home’.

  In front of her, beyond the stile, lay the path that led across the field and down to the lake. Nella could look at that dark stretch of water now without trembling inside, but she still couldn’t make herself pass through the stile and take the short cut from Oaklands to the rectory which passed by the lake. She, and all the family, were marked by what had happened there; they, and the others, too: Steven Rafferty, Eunice, Grev especially. And perhaps Rupert, though how would they ever know about Rupert?