The Country Child

by Alison Uttley

  ‘I wish Mr Right would come along quick,’ she thought as she placed the loaves in a row, and cut fresh lumps from the remaining dough to ‘prove’ on the rack over the oven.

  A knife fell on the floor, and she picked it up. That was a sign a man was coming. If it had been a fork, a woman would be expected. A black soot had waved on the bar all the afternoon, a stranger was on the way. She took off her floury apron and put on a clean one. She straightened up the kitchen and tidied her hair. Then she went to the little looking-glass which hung on the wall, and gazed intently at herself. Rosy cheeks, brown eyes, thick brown hair, a large mouth. She sighed, ‘I wish I wasn’t so red, red hands and cheeks. Vinegar makes a body pale, but I can’t abide the stuff.’ She sighed and absent-mindedly broke off a piece of kissing crust which she laid aside for Susan, when she returned from school.

  Roger barked and tugged at his chain, and she heard steps coming to the side door. It was the oatcake man; she was glad she had heeded the signs and redded up.

  ‘Come in, Mister,’ she cried when she saw him, and he entered the low door and took off his cap. He put his large basket, with its neat piles of brown oatcakes and cream honeycombed pikelets all covered with a white cloth, on the dresser end, and stood shyly by the door.

  ‘You’ve got quite a family, Miss,’ said he. Bright blushes flooded Becky’s neck and mounted to her forehead. She felt cross with herself for reddening; she and Susan were cautions for blushing at nothing.

  ‘Them’s been badly,’ she explained, ‘and I’m taking care of them. Missus and master are out driving, and the little girl is at school. Will you have a cup of tea? You’ve walked a fair way.’

  ‘Thank you kindly, I will,’ said the young man. ‘My basket’s a tidy weight, and it’s a good pull up this hill.’

  Becky pulled out a chair for him and left him by the fire, whilst she went to the cupboard for cups and saucers and the tea. She gave the big copper kettle a shake as it sat on the fire, which seemed to wake it from a sleep, for it immediately began to sing. Then she went to the dairy for milk. She came back with a little jug perched like a bird on one crooked finger.

  ‘A drop of cream, Mister? It wouldn’t be amiss, would it?’

  ‘I don’t mind a speck, I never say nay to a good thing, and not much cream comes my way,’ answered the oatcake man, as he stooped over the chicks.

  Becky set the table and made the tea, keeping a wary eye on the man whom she had never seen without a hat. He was long-legged, tall and straight, curly-haired like the lambs, with a fresh open face and blue eyes. He had only one arm and his empty sleeve was pinned with a large safety-pin to his coat.

  ‘Draw up to the table, Mister,’ said Becky. So he drew up his chair with a squeak over the floor and sat down opposite Becky, who felt abashed and proud of her boldness. Here she was sitting in the missus’s place, and he was in the master’s. What had come over her?

  ‘A drop of tea is very welcome,’ he said, as he drained the cup at a draught and passed it back to Becky. She blushed and refilled it, with a good supply of thick cream, and plenty of brown sugar.

  ‘Was it sweet enough, Mister?’ she asked demurely.

  ‘Aye, I’ve got a sweet tooth, but it was grand.’

  ‘We’re all fond of plenty of sugar,’ said Becky, and she waited a second to see if he would return the obvious compliment which everyone gave, ‘You don’t need sugar, you are sweet enough without,’ but the oatcake man did not reply.

  He was framing his next remark.

  ‘What do they call you, Miss?’

  ‘Becky,’ she said, ‘Becky Moss. I’m an orphan, and I’ve lived here three year come Michaelmas. It’s a good place, but hard.’

  ‘It’s a nice name, Becky,’ he said, as he ate hungrily at the crusty new bread and butter. ‘Becky short for Rebecca I suppose.’ Becky noticed that his cheeks were thin and he ate as if he had had little to eat that day.

  ‘What’s your name, Mister?’ she ventured.

  ‘Gabriel Thorn,’ he answered. ‘I live at Downton, along with my mother. She’s a widow-woman. My father was killed at the quarry. He was a quarryman at Great Hop Quarry; a stone fell on him and crushed him dead. That was a bad business.’

  ‘It was, I am sorry,’ replied Becky sympathetically. ‘And how did you lose your arm,’ she continued, filling his cup again. ‘Did you work in the quarry too?’

  ‘No, I’ve been a sailor, but I had this accident, so I had to give up and come home. Now I sell the oatcakes and my mother makes them.’

  ‘That reminds me, I’ll buy tuthree. Give me a dozen of both, Mister Thorn,’ she smiled.

  ‘Nay, call me Gabriel, everyone does,’ said the young man politely, as he rose and wiped his mouth. ‘Thank you very kindly for the tea,’ he said, and Becky sedately answered:

  ‘You’re very welcome.’

  He put out the batches of the thin cakes, and, readjusting the clean cloth (which Becky could see his old mother washing and hanging on the garden hedge and ironing), he hitched the basket with its broad leather strap on to his shoulder, and went off.

  Becky walked down the little lavender path to the small gate with him and stepped across the cobbles in the yard towards the big gate in the drive, pretending to be looking out for the trap.

  She waved when he turned his head as he disappeared round the corner among the crimsoning mallows, and he nodded back.

  She returned excited and laughing to the kitchen. She had known she would have a sweetheart because the thorny briars had clung to her skirts down the lane.

  ‘What a nice young man. And so polite. Took his cap off when he came in, and him with only one arm, and called me Miss, and didn’t sit down till he was asked, and didn’t drink out of his saucer. Quite the gentleman! What a good thing I noticed the stranger on the bar and changed myself.’

  She sang as she washed up. ‘Above the bright blue sky’, and ‘A fair country maid’. She had just gone into ‘There is a happy land’, when Roger barked again, and the blackbird piped, and the chickens chirped, and the door flew open to admit Mrs Garland laden with string bags and parcels and the weekly paper.

  ‘Take that blackbird away before it gets trodden on, Becky,’ she cried, ‘and move the chicks, and make the tea; your master’s here. There’s a piece of steak to cook, and a teacake to toast.’

  Becky ran out for the rugs and whip, and raced into pantry and larder for food and dishes.

  A quarter of an hour later the kitchen was full of noise and chatter, of good savoury smells, of tea and meat, of toast and cake, of sizzling and bubbling, of tramping feet and loud-breathing men. Joshua came in from putting the horse in the stable, Dan came through to see the time, on his way to the milking. Mrs Garland opened her parcels, put away the groceries, counted the butter and egg money, and sat down to tea.

  Then Susan came in, flushed and early – they had come out half an hour earlier as the school was wanted for a lecture, and the children had scampered home to surprise their parents.

  ‘The oatcake man’s been this afternoon, and I bought two batches,’ said Becky, flushing, ‘and he will wait for the money till he calls next time. I gave him a cup of tea, he looked that tired. His name’s Gabriel, he told me, Gabriel Thorn, and he’s been a sailor, and he has only one arm.’

  ‘You’ve been busy while we’ve been away,’ commented the farmer drily.

  ‘You shouldn’t ask anyone in when we are out, Becky, it isn’t proper. Don’t do it again. I don’t mind a meal at the door, but not inside when we are away,’ and Margaret pursed her lips and shook her head.

  Susan looked from one to the other, and then stared at Becky’s blushing face. She made up her mind to look at this Gabriel who had been a sailor.

  Tea continued in silence, for however much noise and chatter went in the preparation, Tom liked quiet whilst he fed. Margaret sat wrapped in her thoughts, Becky dreamed as she got ready the men’s tea, but Susan looked at the clock and nodded to the dresser, and
talked her silent talk as she ate her bread soaked in gravy, and her ‘Matrimony and Sorrow begins’.

  When she and Becky were alone she got the whole story out of her.

  ‘If you marry him, Becky, I shall come and see you, and nurse your babies. We will buy lots of oatcakes and pikelets, and you will have to make them as well as his mother. Perhaps he could live here and be a cowman.’

  ‘He won’t have me, Susan, I’m not clever enough for him, I’ve had no schooling. I was thinking about it when you had tea. I went to work when I was ten, for I couldn’t understand school ways and my mother was always ailing,’ said Becky despondently.

  ‘I’ll teach you at nights, Becky. You could learn to read and spell and write.’ Susan’s eyes shone and she clasped and unclasped her fingers.

  Every night when the milking was finished, and the tea things were cleared away, Becky got out her copybook. With infinite pains and long deep sighs, her shining head of glossy hair nearly touching the table, and her tongue poking out first at one corner and then at the other corner of her mouth, she copied ‘Adversity, Avarice, Amity’. Susan hung over her, encouraging, praising, and dotting her i’s. Joshua was pleased at her efforts, but Dan laughed and tried to guess the reason. She carried a blue-backed spelling book in her pocket and spent odd minutes learning the list of words as she washed up and made the beds.

  Susan felt that she too must add to her learning to keep her superior position. On the bookcase in the south parlour, wedged between Plate-swimming, The Ladder to Learning, and Clarke’s Wonders was an old leather-bound Latin Grammar, which had belonged to some ancestor with a leaning towards knowledge.

  She had heard at school that Latin was the universal language, and she wondered if she could converse more easily with the moon, or the furniture. Especially when she saw a whole page about a table, she determined to learn all about it, so she struggled with Mensa, with the book propped up against a flowerpot on the windowsill as she peeled the potatoes. Everything would understand quite easily if she knew Latin.

  So the revival of learning began, on the high slopes under the beech woods, in the fields, in barns and cowsheds, in attic and kitchen. Susan addressed the rooms and trees with some words in their own tongue, and Becky’s large round handwriting lay about on scraps of envelopes, with the O’s carefully closed with little latchets, and the T’s bolted and barred.

  The oatcake man came again, quite unconscious of the upheaval he had occasioned in the farm. He leaned against the doorpost and uncovered the basket of curling oatcakes and pale gold pikelets.

  ‘Here’s the oatcake man, Missus,’ cried Becky, running in from the garden with a handful of parsley and a bunch of rhubarb in her arms. She turned shyly to the man with flaming cheeks.

  ‘Good morning, Mr Thorn, it’s a grand day, isn’t it?’

  ‘’Tis indeed,’ agreed Gabriel, and he looked up at the great white cauliflower clouds which climbed from the hills to the top of the elm tree, clouds which might drench him before he got home, which might send shafts of lightning when he was over the ridge, but which were his companions on his long rounds between hamlet, farm and distant village.

  ‘How’s the master, Mam?’ he asked politely, as Margaret turned over his pikelets and handed out a bundle to Becky.

  ‘Pretty middling, he has a touch of sciatica,’ replied Margaret, feeling in her full gathered skirts for her purse.

  ‘Ah,’ replied Gabriel, ‘I know a cure for that. Tell him to carry a little bottle of quicksilver in his hip pocket, Mam, and he’ll be cured in a week.’

  Margaret thanked him, she had heard of the remedy and would try it. But Becky’s mind was revolving as fast as it was capable in an effort to find something to say now the man was before her. She was tongue-tied, and it looked as if he would go without a word if she wasn’t quick.

  ‘I’ve been writing a bit to fill in my time,’ she said. (‘God forgive me for the lie,’ she whispered to herself.) ‘Would you like to see?’ and before he could answer she took her copybook from the drawer in the table and handed it to him.

  ‘Love, loneliness, laughter,’ he read.

  ‘That’s fine,’ he exclaimed as he held it out and examined the letters. He looked at Becky. It was the first time he had seen her closely, for in the kitchen the light was always dim. He saw the tiny gold hairs shining on her strong arms, the soft bloom of her cheeks, her bright eyes, and her unwrinkled brown skin, smooth as a Dorking’s egg.

  He handed the book back to her, and took the money from Mrs Garland.

  He said ‘Good day,’ and walked down the path, through the wicket gate and across the cobbled courtyard to the big gate. He went slowly down by the orchard, whistling softly, staring at the great rooted ivy which climbed along the old wall, a regular tree with boughs and branches.

  ‘Mister Thorn,’ cried a voice, ‘Gabriel!’ He turned sharply and Becky was leaning over the wall, looking down at him and waving to him to stop.

  She ran through the gate and down the hill with something behind her back.

  ‘I thought, leastways Missus thought, you might like a flower or two for your mother, seeing as how we have so many,’ and she thrust into his basket three red roses which she had hastily plucked from the tree on the stable wall, and a spray of lad’s love.

  He smiled a rare smile and she ran back, not waiting to hear what he said.

  The courting had begun, slow love-making, inarticulate with gifts of flowers and peppermints. They met sometimes in the leafy lanes, and wandered up the fields on Sunday nights, and spoke a few words at the door. Becky had done her share, and it was for him to be the pursuer, her boldness left her now she had found her man.

  19

  Mowing Time

  Summer was coming, for long ago the first cuckoo had called in the ash tree, and Becky and Margaret had turned their money and wished. The cottage gardens were full of flowers, blue and purple grannie’s bonnets, blue-eyed beauties, cabbage roses, and bachelor’s buttons. The children took posies to school, lad’s love and dark pansies squeezed tightly in their little hot hands. Susan gathered the cream-hearted tea roses heavy with scent which covered the gable of the house and spread under many windows. She exchanged them with the little girls, a rose for three pansies, a golden ball and a bleeding heart, or she left the little bunch on the teacher’s desk, as a peace offering.

  It was the time for peep shows, ‘A pin to see a peep show’. The children cut open a door from an envelope, and hid behind a piece of glass a few flower petals arranged in a design, a group of slender leaves of lad’s love, with a circle of larkspur petals. The payment to see the wonder, to lift the paper curtain and peep, was a pin. Susan carried a little round pincushion of money, and held in her hand a show of treasures from the pastures, the tiniest of daisies, with honey spots, tormentil, and wild pansies, tied with a grass.

  The turnpike was thick with soft satiny dust, through which the children dragged their happy little boots, kicking up the powder to their noses. But their mothers, returning to their homes with heavy baskets of groceries, had creamy hems on their black skirts as if they had trailed them through milk. Millions of bluebells pushed their little white heads through the green rosettes in the Dark Wood, and rose on pale stems which deepened in a day; the lovely bells drooped their heads and the bluebells were out, a sea beating against the trees, sweeping under the walls into the fields far away. Taller and taller they grew, and their thick stems curved like a sickle with the weight of the flowers. A heavy scent filled the air, and bees awakened the silence of the wood with a continuous hum.

  Susan gathered armfuls of flowers in the fields near the Dark Wood, and carried them a-tiptoe along the stony path, never stopping to pick even the most splendid long-stalked truss of flowers, the kings and queens, for in spring the trees were wide awake and danger lurked again after the winter rest. The woods which had been white with snow were now blue with bluebells, the only flowers that grew there, save filmy fumitory and the field of
ragwort.

  But in the friendly woods round Windystone Hall the bluebells flourished and spilled over the edges, drifting down the fields even to the gates of the house, lakes of blue, mists in the deep green.

  Swallows and swifts returned to the farm, and the old nests in the rafters of the cart places and open sheds, and under the eaves of the barn, were inhabited again. They brought good luck and their clayey nests were left undisturbed year after year.

  But the colour of the bluebells deepened, the scent became unbearably rich, the flowers bowed and swayed like swingboats at a fair as the bees plundered them. They faded, green seeds peeped through the curled-back petals, and an army of green soldiers laden with pointed knapsacks filled the woods.

  The grass became mowing-grass, not to be entered, however bright the flower or brilliant the butterfly. The fields were red with ripening sorrel which spread above the grass like a crimson net. The meadows were painted with rich flowers, big white dog-daisies raising their wideawake faces to the sky, bright enamelled buttercups, clumps of blue and purple wild geranium, gold hawkweed on stilts peeping above the tall grass, lavender scabious, and elusive ragged robin.

  Above the flowers flitted butterflies, and honey bees, clumsy bumble bees, and shining hoverflies. Deep down in the grass was another world, a dwarf world, a forest of small daisies and clover and tormentil with their attendant beasts, field mice, ants, green beetles, and wandering hedgehogs.

  But on the hilltops where the grass was always thin, where no springs watered the soil, and the sun beat down on the rocks and boulders, the flowers were different. Here were little blue scabious, and bird’s foot, poor man’s weather-glass, and yellow rattle.

  The long slender grasses were full of games for children, the country child’s toy shop, with millions of puzzle boxes waiting for little hands to play with them.

  There were tinker tailor grasses, with their little green ears which told her fortune, tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, or this year, next year, sometimes, never, or silk, satin, muslin, rags.