Make Do and Mend in Applewell

by Lilac Mills

  She supposed Sabrina was old enough to make her own way home from the cute little primary school in the heart of the village, but Lottie simply couldn’t bring herself to allow her daughter the freedom. Not yet – she wasn’t ready. Lottie wasn’t, that was: Sabrina was more than ready, as she often let her mother know in no uncertain terms.

  As soon as Lottie got home, she began clearing away the debris from that morning’s mad dash to get the kids out of the door. They’d almost been late again, which was a daily occurrence ever since Morgan had informed her that he wanted to walk and was too big a boy to use the pushchair. Dawdle was the term she used, not walk, but she had to forgive him because he was so young and he only had little legs. More than once she’d had to send the older two on ahead because they were going to be late for class, her heart in her mouth as they galloped along the pavement, she and Morgan hurrying behind as best they could.

  Morgan had recently started attending nursery in the mornings for two and a half hours a day, three days a week, and today was one of those mornings. Lottie relished being able to wander around the village without a toddler in tow, and she also revelled in having the house to herself, however briefly.

  With the toys and assorted clothing gathered up, the breakfast things put away, and the vacuum cleaner given a swift outing in the living room, Lottie was ready to take a proper look at Robin’s bed. She’d had to wrestle the mattress onto the floor last night, and he’d got under the duvet with a blend of excitement and dismay on his face. She could just imagine him boasting to his friends that he’d broken his bed and had to sleep on the floor. Conversely, she could also imagine him complaining to Mrs Campbell, his long-suffering teacher, that he’d been forced to sleep on the floor, leaving Lottie half expecting to hear a knock at the door and find a couple of social workers on the step.

  It didn’t take long for her to measure up the planks of wood and cut them to size. Once they were in place on the frame, she used the brackets to secure them, then pressed down hard on the planks to check they wouldn’t give way, before heaving Robin’s mattress back on the frame and remaking his bed.

  Dusting her hands off, she put her tools away, then went to fetch her youngest son from nursery.

  * * *

  ‘Goes quickly, doesn’t it?’ her friend, Delia, said to her as she approached the school gates and joined the crowd of other parents, who were stamping their feet and complaining about the cold. Thankfully yesterday’s smattering of snow had disappeared overnight, much to the children’s dismay. ‘It’s the fastest couple of hours in the week.’

  ‘I know what you mean.’ Lottie laughed. ‘But at least Morgan will be knackered, so I might get some peace after he’s had his lunch.’

  Morgan was at that stage where he sometimes had an afternoon nap and sometimes didn’t. When he did, Lottie had an awful job to get him to go to sleep at his usual bedtime, but when he didn’t he was as cranky as could be, and she would spent most of the early evening prodding him to keep him awake until his proper bedtime.

  ‘Fancy going to the park tomorrow?’ Delia asked. ‘The weather forecast looks decent enough and as long as we dress up warm, we should be all right. I find it helps if I wear out Tyrone in the morning. If I don’t, he can be a right little so and so by mid-afternoon.’

  They made arrangements to meet at ten o’clock, which would give Lottie enough time to drop Sabrina and Robin off at school, get back home to quickly tidy up, put a load of washing on and pop it on the radiators to dry, make some snacks – Morgan would be sure to be hungry – and dash out of the door again.

  Slightly resentfully, she thought of Henry’s calm exit from the house that morning. He’d rolled out of bed while the children were eating their breakfast, had taken an uninterrupted shower, then had eaten his own peaceful breakfast while she wrestled with three reluctant children, trying to get them dressed. By the time she was downstairs with them, he was ready to leave.

  She pushed the irritation away firmly. She sometimes begrudged the amount of time Henry had to himself without the constant worry of looking after the children, and she knew he occasionally resented that she didn’t go out to work and was able to stay at home all day, but they’d played the who-has-the-worse-end-of-the-stick game for far too long.

  They each had their roles and they each realised the necessity of them – but both of them could still have a tendency to think the other one’s grass was greener. To be fair to Henry, he was a very hands-on dad and it wasn’t his fault that the majority of the childcare fell to her. But sometimes she couldn’t help being annoyed that he was able to walk away for several hours a day, and she wasn’t. To her shame, she was actively looking forward to when Morgan was in school full time, but unfortunately that was still well over a year away.

  She felt even more ashamed when she thought she should be enjoying this time when her children were young. It was a time you could never get back – once it was gone, it was gone, and she did relish it, she honestly did, but sometimes it became a little overwhelming.

  It hadn’t helped that last night Henry had been distant and surly. She’d put it down to Robin having deliberately broken his bed, but it wasn’t as though Henry had been forced to get his screwdriver out and mend the damned thing himself; she’d taken care of it, the way she always took care of everything.

  There it was again, that little bubbling pool of resentment deep inside her.

  If she wasn’t careful, the pool would turn into an ocean and it just might drown her.

  Chapter 3

  Henry

  John Porter’s farm was the other end of the village to Henry’s house, at the top of Oak Lane, which turned into a sort of a dirt track and ended up at Porter’s Farm. Henry’s predecessor had been going there for years, which was quite funny in a way, considering Henry lived less than half a mile away. John had always bought his feed from the company Henry was working at now, and farmers were often conservative in some respects, and loyal too. If they found a company, a salesman, or a brand they liked, they tended to stick with it, come hell or high water; although there was a trend, and a growing one at that, for more innovation in the farming industry, and unfortunately this innovation was impacting on sales – so Henry wasn’t surprised when John shook his head after shaking Henry’s hand.

  ‘I don’t think I’m ready to order from you yet,’ John said, taking his cap off and scratching his head, before putting it back on again. ‘I’m scaling down the dairy herd, see.’

  ‘You are? Why is that?’ Henry asked, although he was pretty sure he knew the answer: simple economics. No matter how much a farmer loved their animals, if they didn’t pay the bills they couldn’t continue to farm them.

  ‘Come and see.’ John walked away across the yard and into the barn, where cows could be heard grumbling noisily amongst themselves.

  Henry followed. He’d automatically put his wellies on as soon as he’d pulled up into the yard, so he was happy enough to traipse into the barn and see what John was talking about.

  A long row of black, bovine faces peered at him through the bars of some sturdy fencing, contentedly munching a pile of hay. They were Welsh Black cattle and Henry’s heart sank. He mightn’t be a farmer himself, but he’d been in the agricultural industry long enough to know what Welsh Blacks signified. A hardy breed, they usually over-wintered outside, where they birthed their calves with the minimum of fuss. Unlike most other breeds, they could withstand brutal temperatures as long as they had enough fodder, and they didn’t need rich, green grass either as they were quite happy with rough grazing, eating more or less anything growing on a hillside or in a field. As a result, they didn’t need to be brought into the barns during winter, with all the additional expense that brought to the farmer, and it meant they only needed the occasional bale of hay, and maybe a sack or two of cattle nuts now and again. Their need for supplementary feed was nothing when compared to the Friesians John Porter had favoured in the past.

  ‘I got ’em mai
nly for beef,’ John said. ‘But they’ll give some milk, too, and with both the meat and the dairy, we can keep the farm shop going.’

  ‘I didn’t know you had a shop,’ Henry said. ‘I knew you supplied some of the local outlets with butter and milk…’

  ‘We’re converting one of the sheds. Come and have a look.’

  Once more Henry was led across the yard, towards the farmhouse this time, although they didn’t go in; instead they swung past it and around the side, stopping beside a building with a relatively new roof, new windows and a new door.

  ‘We’ve got the necessary paperwork to sell our cheese, butter and milk on-site, as well as our own beef products. I’ll still be running a dairy herd, but it won’t be half the size it was. I’m thinking of branching into pigs, too.’

  ‘You are?’

  ‘Not as fussy as sheep; they don’t need so much messing with. You’ve always gotta be dipping sheep, or clipping their hooves, or shearing, or doing something or other with them. You don’t have that with pigs. And we can sell the pork alongside the prime beef I’m gonna get from my Welsh Blacks.’ John’s smile faltered. ‘We’ve got to make changes,’ he said, ‘else we’re gonna go under.’

  ‘Oh, dear.’ Henry was well aware of the difficulties farmers faced. It was either intensive farming on an industrial scale, or they ran the risk of going to the wall. Small farmers like John found it hard to compete, so Henry understood perfectly why the man was branching out and trying to cut his overheads.

  ‘You’ve got to diversify to make a living in this game,’ John said. ‘Have a unique selling point.’

  ‘I understand.’ It wasn’t the first time Henry had heard this story. He’d lost count of the number of times he’d been to farms, over the course of his career, only to discover that the farmer had gone out of business. He’d forgotten the statistics, but it was quite alarming how many farm businesses folded in one year alone.

  ‘We’ve still got a bit of work to do in the shop,’ John was saying. ‘We haven’t finished kitting it out yet, and there’s still some stuff to shift.’ He pointed to a huge pile of rubbish on one side.

  Henry was impressed by the man’s drive and dedication. Farming was hard work, and he was certain he didn’t want to do it, but he supposed if you were born into it and it was in your blood, you carried on regardless, if you could. It was just a shame that it would affect his own livelihood. With fewer and fewer farmers owning and breeding fewer and fewer animals, the need for agricultural feed was shrinking. Henry knew the big conglomerate farms had deals with companies like his, but the middling farmers were gradually being squeezed out economically. And their loss was also his loss.

  Feeling rather sad and quite depressed Henry turned to leave, but just then his eye caught something in the pile of discarded items. It was a wooden rowing boat. Dear God, the things you find in old barns, he thought to himself.

  ‘Thinking of taking up fishing as well, are you, John?’ he joked, jerking his head towards the old boat.

  John laughed. ‘She’ll never be seaworthy again. The only thing it’s good for is firewood. You wouldn’t believe all the stuff that’s already been taken out from here. That’s the problem with farms – you never throw anything out in case you can find a use for it. A bit like George down the lane, but on a bigger scale.’

  Oh, yes, Henry had forgotten about George Nightingale’s penchant for hanging onto things. According to Lottie, the man’s mantra had been ‘waste not, want not’, and consequently his bungalow, his garage, his shed and God knows what else had filled up with all kinds of stuff – most of it rubbish, as far as Henry was concerned. He remembered the man had organised a sort of lawn sale a while ago, but he hadn’t been selling anything – he was giving stuff away for free. Lottie had come home smiling like a Cheshire cat because she’d acquired several tins of paint and some other bits and pieces from him. She’d put them in the shed and he guessed they were probably still there. The thought flitted through his mind that maybe his wife was turning into a female version of George Nightingale.

  ‘Lottie is a bit of a make do and mend person, and doesn’t throw much out,’ he said to John. ‘It comes in handy sometimes, though,’ he added, and proceeded to tell him about Robin and his bed-breaking escapade of the day before.

  Henry had no doubt Lottie would have fixed the offending item by now, but it was a damn shame the boy couldn’t have a brand new one. The one he was sleeping in had been second-hand when they’d bought it, although the mattress was new – he distinctly remembered Lottie bringing the bed home in bits in their car one Saturday afternoon. She’d discovered it on a website called Freecycle, where people gave away unwanted stuff for nothing. Although Henry appreciated what she did, it didn’t make him feel very good about himself that he earned so little his family had to make do with other people’s cast-offs.

  John chuckled. ‘I remember my granddad telling me that Granny made a crib for my Uncle Arthur out of a drawer once. She didn’t do anything fancy to it, just shoved some blankets in, and bingo. She only had the one cot, see, and my dad was still sleeping in it, so she had to find somewhere to put the new baby.’ He shook his head, a faraway look in his eyes. ‘Kids these days don’t know they’re born,’ he said. ‘I mean, they get everything brand new, and nothing is built to last.’ He jabbed a finger at the boat. ‘Take that old boat – it’s at least eighty years old. Mind you, it probably hasn’t seen water for about seventy of them. In my granddad’s day, they probably would have shoved a mattress in it, and called it a bed.’

  In the abrupt, ensuing silence, Henry looked at John, and John stared back at him. A thought popped into his head, but he didn’t say anything. From the look on John’s face, Henry guessed John might be thinking the same thing.

  John took his cap off again, scratched his head, and replaced it. ‘It would make a fine bed for a little boy, if someone was clever with their hands,’ he said, slowly.

  Henry knew John wasn’t referring to him. He could put up a shelf and screw flatpack furniture together, but it was his wife who had the singular skill of turning what he would have sent to the skip into something fresh and useable.

  ‘You can have it, if you can make use of it,’ the farmer offered.

  Henry was sorely tempted. He could see how it would look in Robin’s bedroom, imagining an old anchor on the wall above for decoration, or a ship’s wheel. As John said, in the right hands, it would make a fine bed indeed.

  ‘Surely it could be made watertight again?’ he said.

  John barked out a laugh. ‘I haven’t got the time nor the inclination to mess about with boats. Got enough to do here. Take it – I’ll drop it down to you next time I’m in the village. It probably won’t fit in your car.’

  Henry squinted at it and was certain it wouldn’t. He was also certain that he wasn’t too keen on taking the boat and not paying for it. It felt too much like charity for his liking. ‘Let me give you something for it.’

  ‘Don’t be daft. I don’t want nothing. If your Lottie can make use of it, that’s better than it sitting behind the cowshed for another seventy years, because that’s where it’ll end up. You ought to go and see what’s behind there already.’

  Henry didn’t, just in case John offered to give him anything else. ‘In that case, thank you,’ he said.

  Lottie would be in raptures – he hoped. It was a big project and he prayed she was up to it, otherwise it would sit in his own garden and quietly rot there, instead of behind John Porter’s cowshed.

  Henry thanked him once again and they said their goodbyes, but as soon as he was back in the warmth of the car and trundling down the lane towards the village, despondency struck and he pulled over outside Mairi Edwards’ bungalow.

  Dear God, how had things come to this?

  He leant forwards and folded his arms on top of the steering wheel, rested his head on them, and took a shuddering breath.

  They should never have gone in for such a big mortgage, but
he’d wanted to stay in the village where he’d been born and bred, and there hadn’t been much else on the market at the time. If they’d waited another six months or so, one of the little terraced cottages off Applewell’s main street might have come up for sale, but oh no, they’d been young and impatient, and full of glorious optimism. He wondered where it had gone, all that youthful enthusiasm and the certainty they could achieve anything they set their minds to.

  Now, over a decade later, he was saddled with an obscenely large mortgage, a job he didn’t particularly like and would shortly be out of, and a family to support. Not only that, he’d been reduced to accepting the kindness of relative strangers so his boy could have a new bed. And he didn’t even know whether Robin wanted a nautical theme for his bedroom. For all Henry knew, his son might have his heart set on a damned fire engine, like his friend.

  Henry sat up and slapped the steering wheel, suddenly furious, torn between the knowledge he should be thankful for what he had – a gorgeous wife, three wonderful children, and a nice house (albeit one they shortly wouldn’t be able to afford) – and feeling hopeless and overwhelmed. ‘Sort yourself out,’ he muttered, gruffly.

  Instead of wallowing in self-pity, he needed to be more proactive. Jobs didn’t drop out of the sky and fall in one’s lap: they had to be actively sought out and applied for, and that’s what he must do. Starting now. He didn’t need to be at his next appointment for an hour, so he had time to do a quick trawl of the job sites. He could hardly do it at home – with his children vying for time on the family’s clunky computer, and the risk of him not wiping his search history properly (he’d tell Lottie, of course he would – but not just yet), he’d be better off using his mobile.

  Unfortunately, when he checked the usual job sites, he saw that there wasn’t a great deal out there when it came to his type of job and the location he needed.