The Land Girl

by Allie Burns

  Cecil cut her dead with a withering glance and addressed Mother, who had gone a deathly pale and hadn’t moved since Cecil first spoke.

  ‘Asquith has no right to force me to join up,’ Cecil continued. ‘I’m going to object on the grounds of my conscience.’

  Emily shook her head; her brother was to become a conscientious objector. He’d witnessed what sort of response his views elicited at John’s leaving party. It was just like him to not worry about the consequences for the rest of the family.

  ‘In that case, perhaps you could stay here with Mother, so that I can go to work and do my duty to King and country.’

  ‘I don’t believe that it is my place to run into machine-gun fire so that the upper classes can cling to their position or the capitalists can prosper. That’s not duty, that’s madness.’

  ‘But what about John?’ Emily asked. ‘He’s a hero, and you will undo that if you bring shame on the family.’

  ‘I don’t want to hurt the family. If I could leave you out of it, and just pay the price myself, then of course I would. And I will tell you now, just how sorry I am for the trouble I’ll bring to you,’ Cecil replied.

  ‘Oh Cecil.’ Although it sounded as if she wanted him to go off and risk his life, that wasn’t the case at all. Nobody wanted their loved ones to fight, but for both of them to sit the war out was so unpatriotic. ‘You will let everyone down.’ Mother still hadn’t said a word. ‘Don’t you think our mother has suffered enough?’

  Emily pushed her soup away. How would she explain to Theo that her brother was refusing to fight while he risked his life every day in the name of his country?

  ‘What you’re talking about is dishonourable, you know?’ she said. ‘If every man refused to fight then the war would be lost. Mother, you must tell him.’

  ‘If every man refused to fight,’ Cecil jumped in, ‘then there would be no war and our differences would have to be resolved peacefully.’

  She dropped her head. This was just like Cecil. He would be impossible to convince otherwise, but he would listen to Mother.

  ‘This war is so unfair,’ she said, thinking of Theo out there, still cheerful and doing his best for his country. ‘But if we don’t fight against the Germans, they might come here and do to us what they did to Belgium. Have you thought of that?’

  ‘Do you want him to go and fight?’ Mother said.

  Her mouth gaped open. Of course that wasn’t what she wanted. Cecil was never meant to be a soldier. He wasn’t much older than a boy. His skin was still soft; his face wasn’t that of a killer. One brother had been missing for months, what could she possibly gain from losing another?

  ‘That’s a terrible accusation,’ she replied.

  ‘Cecil, my darling boy.’ Mother carried on. ‘Are you really certain?’

  The rasp of Emily’s breathing filled the room.

  ‘My mind is made up.’

  ‘Very well,’ Mother replied.

  Emily jumped up. Was that it?

  ‘Your family will stand by you …’

  ‘Mother …’ Emily began.

  Mother raised her hand to silence her. ‘We must respect Cecil’s decision and support him.’

  ‘And does it matter what I think?’ she said.

  But as usual, Mother didn’t answer.

  The village would turn against them. The reminders of their patriotic duty were everywhere; Kitchener’s finger pointing at them from his poster on the railway station wall. They would lock Cecil up, subject him to hard labour. Would they even accept her on the farm if Cecil brought this disgrace on them?

  She wiped her tears away. It was too much: first John and now this.

  ‘I will stand by Cecil’s decision.’ Mother blotted her lips and then shuffled out of the room and upstairs to bed.

  ‘You are making life impossible for me. Mr Tipton is desperate for help on the farm, and yet Mother insists I’m by her side, day and night.’

  ‘You spoke to me of duty, well Mother is yours.’

  ‘This might well break her, you know. Do you even care?’

  ‘Of course,’ he said, his voice breaking. He uncrossed his legs and stood from his seat. Had he even stopped to consider their financial troubles? Did he care that without John at the helm Mother would continue to take handouts and do nothing to resolve the root of the problem?

  He was crying now. Huge tears dripping onto the tablecloth. His decision would bring him enough grief – she couldn’t add to it. She comforted him, put her arms around him. He was a pitiful sight stooped over with his nose streaming. He was electric to touch as if he exuded the toxic danger that he brought to the family.

  He stepped out onto the lawn, towards the monkey puzzle tree, swung back his arm and punched the trunk. He lifted his face to the heavens and opened his mouth, but from inside the dining room his yell was silent.

  Chapter Nine

  February 1916

  Mrs L Cotham

  HopBine House

  New Lane

  Chartleigh

  Kent

  The envelope sat on the mantelpiece for an entire morning, peeking out from behind the photograph of John in a frame painted with forget-me-nots. Finally, the three of them – Emily, Mother and Cecil – gathered in the sitting room. Emily took the opener and slashed open the envelope.

  The War Office had completed its investigations and Officer John Cotham was now officially regarded as having died.

  Her mother whimpered. Cradled her face with her hands.

  ‘No wonder Kitchener wanted bachelors.’ Cecil’s bottom lip trembled as he spoke.

  Emily tumbled into a long, black tunnel that stretched to eternity; the same tunnel she’d fallen into when her father had died. No matter how far she fell, the dark hole stretched into the shadows. Her legs were filled with a substance as heavy and clogged as the mud Theo described in the trenches. She’d wanted to hide in her bedroom until someone came to tell her it was over, that it wasn’t true. But Mother needed them both. She wept uncontrollably as if there was no room in the house for her or Cecil to grieve as well.

  When friends and neighbours called on them, Mother put on a show.

  ‘I’m but one of thousands of mothers in the same position.’

  Privately, Mother fretted, ‘Would I have treated him differently as a baby had I known?’ Her food went untouched. She paced about the house in the dead of the night, wept until her throat was sore and winced as she swallowed her tea. Worst of all, she became fixated with John’s whereabouts. In a husky voice, she speculated that the War Office had got it wrong. Perhaps they’d confused him with another man.

  ‘It must be difficult to keep track of them all, so many men, scores missing or killed.’

  Then one of the sets of John’s identity tags was returned to them in the post, along with the diary full of the names of the men he had lost in battle. The officer uniform that they had paid for arrived wrapped in brown paper.

  Emily flicked through the pages, pressing her fingers to the inked names, and then at the very last page, at the end of the list she added one last soldier:

  John Cotham.

  And then she added his service number after his name.

  Emily encouraged Mother to write to an old friend of her family. Lady Heath had been widowed when her husband had been killed on the first day of the Somme in 1914. Lady Heath wrote back suggesting that her friend make a remembrance book. Mother pasted in photographs, letters, press cuttings and John’s identity tags. Lady Heath shared the poetry she had written about her husband, but Mother said she just didn’t have the words.

  There was nothing that she could do to reach her.

  The letters and bills piled up in the library, but Mother wouldn’t allow her to open them.

  ‘We can’t ignore our problems forever,’ Emily insisted. ‘We will have to do something.’

  Despite the lack of sleep and loss of appetite, Mother rapped the glass with her fists and yelled that the vegetable garden ne
eded to go. Emily agreed for once. Her hopes of doing any war work had died with John and the plot was a cruel reminder, but even so it was one of the last things she’d done with her brother and she couldn’t let it go back to the roses yet.

  Desperate to soothe Mother’s grief, Emily suggested a memorial service.

  ‘We could hold a service at the church, followed by a wake on the lawn.’

  She had to do something to help Mother find her strength. She still couldn’t believe it herself, and dear John deserved a fitting tribute. The problem was Cecil. Now that word about his conscientious objection was travelling around the village, they might be alone at the service. The memorial might be for John, but it could end up being about Cecil.

  *

  March 1916

  Emily rushed down to the hallway as the front door slammed shut.

  ‘No good,’ Mother said, tossing her gloves onto the hall table, her voice still hoarse. She barged past Emily and Daisy on her way to the kitchen.

  ‘What did they say?’ Emily cantered to keep up with Mother.

  ‘They were a bunch of jumped-up old has-beens dizzy on the power bestowed upon them by the Crown. It could hardly be called a hearing, because Cecil wasn’t heard at all. They didn’t even let him speak. Not once.’ She paused to clear her own throat. ‘He had written a stirring and powerful speech in defence of his principles.’

  Mother searched about her, opening cupboards and slamming them shut. The servants’ indicator board behind her was a reminder that they were on the other side of the house now.

  ‘They imprisoned him there and then.’

  Emily gripped the kitchen table. First John, and now Cecil, gone within a matter of weeks.

  Mother asked Edna for a glass of something stiff. Edna lifted her hands from the butler sink in the scullery, dried them on her apron and took a bottle of cooking sherry out of the cupboard. She set down a thin-waisted glass, but Mother leant over her and took a whisky tumbler down instead.

  ‘Fill her up, please.’

  Mother knocked it back and flung open the scullery door, Emily chasing behind her.

  Emily was too late to catch her. She was already down at the vegetable garden kicking up the earth.

  ‘Mother! Please! Don’t do that. It’s John’s …’

  ‘It isn’t. It has nothing to do with your poor brother. He didn’t ever show an interest in farming and crops in all his twenty-four years. It’s just another of your ideas.’

  Tears pricked at Emily’s eyes. Without a grave to tend, Mother might have found comfort in nurturing this garden and seeing it yield crops. Instead, Mother knocked it all up. Soil and tender shoots flew everywhere.

  ‘And what will Lady Radford say? Her titled relatives are losing sons like a flower surrenders its seeds to the wind. And I suppose you’ve heard about Lady Clara?’

  Emily shook her head.

  ‘She’s gone to France to set up a hospital in an abbey near Paris with the French Red Cross. She’s taken her car to use as an ambulance.’

  That stung Emily. Still Mother refused to see that Emily could and should be doing her bit too.

  ‘Meanwhile, Cecil has been dragged off to prison.’ Mother slowed down now. ‘I couldn’t go on if I was on my own, I really couldn’t.’ For a moment, she actually stopped and her steel-blue gaze settled on Emily’s face, her eyes searching. She steadied her hands on Emily’s shoulders and then her body collapsed as she gave into a sob. Emily filled with warmth and reached out to embrace Mother.

  ‘I need a lie-down,’ Mother said, straightening up and dusting down her skirt.

  ‘What is going to happen about the house?’ Emily blurted out. They couldn’t go on not communicating with one another if it was just the two of them. She had to do as John had asked and ensure they pulled together.

  But the moment was gone. Mother returned to the house and closed the door behind her.

  *

  She dug up the seed potatoes herself, and dismantled the frames for the runner beans that had survived Mother’s rampage.

  Pieter and Stefan, the Belgian refugees, came to help her plant the new rose bushes. The poor Belgians, who had come to England with nothing, were grateful that John had given them a safe home for the war. They would call it John’s Rose Garden.

  All the while, Mother was in bed. Absent from life in all but body.

  The rose bushes were already mature and within a week were budding up. As the green seams of the buds receded, crimson red pushed through.

  Chapter Ten

  April 1916

  The night before the memorial Uncle Wilfred arrived. Mother stayed in her room at first, but eventually she dressed and joined them.

  He spread his arms wide and pulled her to him. Mother sobbed into his chest while Emily wished there was something she could do. Supper was subdued. Whenever Mother let out a wail, Wilfred covered her hand on the table with his own and patted it. Later, he raised a hand to her face and she flinched, but he was only wiping a tear from beneath her eye.

  Emily was suddenly interested in her rhubarb syllabub. His actions were very familiar for someone who’d had nothing to do with the family for twenty-five years.

  He stayed overnight.

  News of Cecil’s imprisonment had travelled, and the attendance at the memorial service the next day was an insult to John. At the tea, after the church service, it was just Emily, Mother, Wilfred, Daisy, Edna, Mr and Mrs Peters and the Tiptons. Grandmother declined the invitation, on the grounds that it was all too tragic; first a son and now a grandson. She didn’t want to dredge up her painful grief.

  They all stood with customary dry eyes staring at the naked rose bushes as if they’d give them meaning and an explanation for their loss. Emily read ‘Remember’ by Rossetti but she didn’t make it through to the end. She began to sob so hard that at first the words were blurred and then the verse was forgotten and she put up her hand to cover her face, and hung her head to the ground.

  A comforting arm around her back pulled her close. She leant on the black-clad shoulder expecting the slight bones of her mother and started when she found it was much fleshier. When she lifted her head, it was kindly Mrs Tipton.

  ‘There, there, my love,’ she said.

  ‘I need to rest,’ Mother said, her shoulders falling away once the guests had gone home. She remained, hopeless and lost, until Wilfred stepped closer and proffered his arm. He’d hung his head throughout the service, a handkerchief blotting his nose, a show of grief for a nephew he hardly knew. Mother, too frail to carry herself upright, leant into him.

  Emily wished someone would support her and let her rest. She’d never been so bone-tired in all her life, but instead it was down to her to thank the others for coming and accept their condolences on behalf of the family, such as it was now.

  Mother tilted her face up to Wilfred, basking in his attention; his banal quotations seemingly carried meaning to her. ‘But the only way to look now is to the future,’ he said.

  Mother nodded, her head falling to one side as if straining at the thought of putting John’s death behind her.

  Her stomach tightened. It was easy for Wilfred to appear out of nowhere and spout meaningless aphorisms, however well intentioned, but it was far harder for those who knew and loved John to move on so soon.

  When Emily had said goodbye to the last of the guests, she returned inside the house where she found Uncle Wilfred alone in the sitting room.

  ‘I’ve sent your mother upstairs to change,’ Uncle Wilfred explained. It took her a moment to notice what was different. It was bright in the sitting room. He’d asked Daisy to draw the curtains. Light was flooding the room again to make it summer inside as well as out, and glinting the glass of the dark oak sideboard and the china hanging from the rail.

  ‘Mother must have the time and space to grieve,’ she warned him, though she wasn’t brave enough to meet his eye as she said it.

  Daisy came in at that moment with the tea things and set
them on the table. Uncle Wilfred eyed Daisy’s ankles as she adjusted the vase. She was dressed in her shorter afternoon dress with a white-lace collar and cuffs. Her tiara-like cap was held in place with black velvet ribbon.

  ‘Why don’t you change?’ Uncle Wilfred said to Emily.

  ‘I’m quite all right as I am, thank you.’ She raised her gaze this time and smiled at him sweetly, her jaw set in a message of defiance. His support might be welcomed, but she wasn’t as helpless or in need as her mother.

  ‘I want you to know that you’re not alone. You mustn’t feel you have to bear the burden now that the men are all gone.’

  ‘That’s kind of you, thank you. But I’m sure we’ll manage. One way or another.’

  Wilfred laughed at her, his shoulders rising and falling. ‘Are you aware that your brother asked me for help?’

  The way he was so clinical about it filled her veins with ice.

  She nodded.

  ‘Inflation is high, as are taxes, and as for death duties, well – something has to pay for this war – so you mustn’t think ill of your father.’

  ‘Oh, I really don’t,’ she said.

  ‘Good. Good. Well your brother also asked that I take care of your mother if anything should happen to him.’

  ‘Really?’ John had told her that she and Mother must pull together, that Mother would need her daughter. But he’d been vague too and said she must accept whatever happened. What had he planned for them all? He’d been so certain he wouldn’t return, and he’d been right.

  ‘Don’t look so worried,’ Wilfred said. ‘My goodness they could run trains along those frown lines.’ He was clearly amused by her. ‘I shan’t interfere. The important thing is there’s no risk of you losing your home. It’s all secure and you don’t need to feel burdened either.’

  ‘I’m not,’ she said. But it was a lie; of course she was tethered to Mother, unable to follow her own desires.

  ‘Your mother would like to get away from the village. There are too many memories up here and so on. She’s to come and stay with me in London for a while.’