I got up at five, every morning except Sunday, and did my best to be at the post office at six, when the mail was due to arrive from Breckham Market. Sometimes it was late getting there, and quite often I was, but whatever the weather and however long it took I managed to complete each day’s deliveries somehow. Mr Howlett, the sub-postmaster, had impressed on me that The Mail Must Get Through, and I felt quite heroic about my part in the process.
It’s a rotten job in winter, though, setting out from the post office in freezing darkness, back and bike both loaded, to deliver by torchlight. Bike wheels skid on the rutted snow of the roads, legs sink into the roadside drifts, feet slip on icy garden paths, fingers are so numbed that they can’t feel the letters. People’s letterboxes are either non-existent or sealed up against the draught, so it’s trudge round to back doors, ‘Good dog, good dog, there’s a good boy, shut up you stupid animal,’ while the snow crumbles over the tops of your wellies and soaks your socks. I’d have gone on strike, except that no one had asked me to do the job in the first place. So I just thought of the money and ploughed on.
It wasn’t quite so bad when daylight came. And there were one or two housewives, Dad’s nice regular customers, who would invite me in for a cup of coffee if they happened to see me, and that hope helped to keep me going. I was always careful to stand on their doormats while I drank it, so as not to make a mess on their kitchen floors, and I worked on the principle of never refusing a hot drink, even if I’d just had one elsewhere, in case the offer wasn’t made again.
My only exception to that was with old Miss Griggs, who’d been the headmistress when I was at the village school. She lived in a house at the far end of Byland, on the road that led out to where the Hall had once been. Her house was my final delivery point. She had a lot of mail because she belonged to various organizations, most of them to do with wildlife, and she used to watch out for me like a hawk.
I suppose it was a bit mean of me to try to nip up the path, slam the letters through her box and make my getaway before she could open the door. She was retired, and probably lonely, and it was very nice of her to keep on offering me cups of coffee even though I always refused them with the excuse that I was late and had to get back to the post office. But I’d had enough of Miss Griggs when I was at school. By singling me out for her favour she had made my life a misery. If she hadn’t been nice to me, I wouldn’t have been tormented by Andy Crackjaw, and the memory of that was still so painful that I wasn’t prepared to forgive her.
Chapter Fifteen
As the weather improved, so did Mrs Howlett. By the time spring had sprung and the early birds were making a racket in Spirkett’s Wood as I rode past in the mornings, I was made redundant. Still, I’d done very well out of the job. Twenty pounds saved, though I’d worn a hole in the seat of my jeans and demolished several pairs of Dad’s socks.
Mum said she’d never been richer in her life. With the prospect of field work to come, when all three of us would be out earning, she took it into her head that she’d like to go away for a holiday later in the year. We’d never been away, and Mum fancied going to a Butlin’s holiday camp.
‘Hope you enjoy it,’ said Dad.
‘All of us, I mean. A family holiday before our Janet goes to college.’
‘I’m not going to a holiday camp,’ I said, alarmed.
‘Why ever not? There’s bingo, competitions, dancing, something for everybody. Enjoy yourself for a change, lovey.’
‘I’m saving,’ I pointed out. ‘I couldn’t afford it.’
‘I’d help you,’ said Mum generously. ‘What about you, Vince? You’d come with us, wouldn’t you?’
‘No, I wouldn’t.’
‘Well, you miserable devil, Vincent Thacker! Why can’t you behave like anybody else’s husband?’
‘Because I’m not, am I?’
They didn’t often take the trouble to have a personal row, so I went to the kitchen and let them get on with it.
I’m just about sick and tired of you. Just when we get a little extra money and can go out a bit, you won’t come with me.’
‘I’m not stopping you, am I? You can go by yourself.’
‘A fine thing that’d look, having to go on holiday without my husband! You never come out with me. I don’t know why I ever married you.’
‘You know damn well why you did. You were glad enough to, at the time!’
Dad stamped out and I made a thoughtful pot of tea. This was a new one on me. So I must have been on the way before they got married … I’d read some statistics about pregnant brides so I knew it wasn’t unusual, but it comes as a bit of a shock when your own parents are involved. Statistics is other people. Besides, it was beyond imagining – Dad and Mum so consumed by passion for each other that they couldn’t wait for the wedding ceremony! I decided to ignore it.
‘Tea up, Dad,’ I yelled, and the Crackjaw mongrel went into hysterics behind their back fence.
Mum clipped the Butlin’s coupon from her magazine and sent for the brochure anyway, but when she discovered how much the holiday camp would cost she nearly had a fit. In the end, she decided that she was going to Stopat’um for her holiday, as usual, and put the money towards a washing-machine instead.
Before field work started I spent a few days with Caroline Adams in Breckham Market. It made a change, but I didn’t enjoy it much, apart from the use of their plumbing. I bought some new underclothes and dressmaking material in the town, but we spent most of the time mooching about, drinking coffee, and then drifting back to her room to listen to records. Caroline hadn’t got a place at Oxford either, so she was going to York. Since leaving school she’d been working for her father, but she’d hated it and had walked out of his office. Her boy-friend Richard was giving trouble, and what with one thing and another she was fed up and couldn’t wait to leave home.
The Adamses’house was absolutely luxurious. There were only three of them, but they had a bathroom and a shower room and a downstairs cloakroom as well. Three loos, so they could all go at the same time if they needed to. But it wasn’t a happy place. There was a lot of heavy atmosphere when her parents were about, and I was glad to get back to Byland. I found that I was looking forward to spending the summer at home in the country, with no exams to worry about and money to be earned in the open air.
Field work began in May with asparagus cutting. The grower was very particular about having the stalks cut correctly because he sent it to London where it sold for fantastic prices. We were careful, because our pay was docked if we had more than a few rejects, but at least we could take home what we’d been made to pay for. For a couple of weeks we ate asparagus with everything.
After that it was sugar beet hoeing, bring your own hoe. Then the fruit: strawberries, blackcurrants, plums and apples. The work was intermittent but it would keep me busy until term started, and as it was piece work I could earn a useful amount if I really flogged at it.
Between times, I read some of the recommended books and conducted a correspondence with the university lodgings bureau and a list of landladies in order to get a room. Mum knitted like mad for me, and all three of us cut out and pinned and sewed up my new clothes. I couldn’t bear to have my hair flopping round my face as I worked out of doors, so I finally persuaded Dad to cut it short for me.
Then it was back to the fields, sometimes on my bike and sometimes on a special bus with Mum and a dozen of the village women. God, how they yackety-yacked! Ribbed me, too, or dropped snide remarks, but I didn’t care much. I kept as far away from them as possible when we got to work and they soon started puffing and blowing, bent double with their behinds in the air as they shuffled between the rows, too busy earning to yack any more.
It was hard work, but I enjoyed it. Happiness is a mindless, dirty job. It wasn’t much of a life, working throughout the heat of the day and coming home tired and filthy, wanting only a wash and a meal and bed. My face and arms were burned with wind as much as with sun, and my legs and fee
t were scratched and sore and my hands were stained and my fingernails were broken and the skin on my knuckles was cracked and split, but as I sat at night absorbing an hour’s telly and nursing my cuts with ointment, I was happy.
Not madly, sensationally, fantastically, fabulously, groovily happy. Just plain happy. Contented. All my school life I’d been working towards university and now that I was really on my way there I could afford to enjoy my last few months in the country, knowing that I wasn’t going to be stuck for life with no plumbing and only my bike for transport, looking forward to making new friends and having great times.
And one reason for my contentment was that, working in the fields, I could be natural. No need to try to make a good impression on anybody, or to pretend that I was what I wasn’t. It was a wonderful relief. Remembering Yorkshire Paula, at Oxford, I determined that once I got to university I’d never be con-temptible again. I’d use my own voice, and I’d be proud to tell people that my Dad worked in a shop and my Mum did field work. But I’d be careful not to romanticize our way of life because I know all about the realities of shop and field work. Happiness is a mindless, dirty job only if you can see an end to it.
Take strawberries, for example. And please do, because I never want to see another. Strawberry-picking sounds idyllic. But in fact it’s muscle-cramping, filthy, nauseating work: creeping at a squat along the rows for hours on end, picking against time to fill your baskets while the season lasts and the weather holds, scrabbling among slug-slime and piercing straws to find the sound, acceptable fruit because you don’t get paid for picking anything else, plagued by the flies that cluster on your sweaty skin.
The strawberries rot, slug-nibbled and bird-pecked, on the stalk and the remains squish on your fingers. The strawberry smell is sickening. Individual strawberries are repulsive: misshapen, every pore sprouting a whisker, bulbous as an old man’s nose. No one works at picking field strawberries for pleasure. If I’d thought that I’d have to spend the rest of my life scratting out on field work just in order to maintain our poor rustic standard of living, I’d have been bitter enough. But that summer, last summer, I was happy, working in the fields while I waited for real life to start.
Then Dad fell out of our apple tree.
Chapter Sixteen
It was a Saturday afternoon towards the end of September, less than two weeks before the beginning of term. I no longer had my Saturday morning job at the shop because Gran Thacker had decided to economize by employing a schoolgirl instead. I didn’t mind, because she was a nice willing kid and I knew that Dad would need help when I went to college.
Mum and I had been picking apples all month, and I’d just done my last morning on the job. I wanted to concentrate on getting ready for college, by scrubbing some of the ingrained dirt off my hands for a start. My new second-hand trunk already squatted in one corner of the living-room, partly filled.
Mr Jessup’s fish-and-chip van was very late that day. He usually came soon after one, but he still hadn’t arrived when Dad got home from the shop at half-past. While we were waiting for our dinner, Dad decided that he might as well make a start on picking our own apples.
The tree in our back garden is a big old Bramley, never been pruned, twenty feet high, needing a ladder. The hard winter had held it back, but in late spring the branches had been smothered with such a fragrant outburst of pink and white blossom that going to and from our lav was a real pleasure. Now the tree was loaded with fruit, enough to keep us in pies throughout the winter. Some of the apples near the top, flushing red in the autumn sunshine, were as big as my two fists, so heavy that I wondered how the crooked twigs could hold them.
Dad had only just climbed up the ladder when the fish-and-chip van arrived. To make the climb worthwhile, he stayed up at the top of the tree to pick a basketful of apples while Mum went to buy the grub. Mr Jessup refused his usual cup of tea on account of being so late, and chugged back down the lane. Mum brought in the steaming parcel, with its mouth-watering fish-in-batter smell, and started to get out the knives and forks and salt and vinegar.
I was at the kitchen sink in bare feet, bra and jeans, having a much-needed wash before we ate, when there was a crack from outside like a gun going off. Then a shout of alarm, more cracking, and an ominous slithering noise. I rushed to the open door in time to see Dad, clutching a broken branch, topple off the ladder and thump down on the grass. The ladder fell with a sickening crash on top of him.
I ran to him just as I was. He lay silent on his back among the apples, his eyes closed, the ladder across his body, leaves and twigs still pattering down. I fell on my knees beside him, fearful that he was dead. ‘Dad, Dad,’ I urged, and thankfully his eyelids flickered.
Mum arrived panting. ‘What shall we do?’ she panicked. ‘What shall we do?’
‘You stay with him, I’ll go round to the farm for help.’
I didn’t stop to put on my sandals. I dragged my shirt over my wet arms and buttoned it as I ran up the lane, my face stiff with drying soap and fright. I was afraid there’d be no one at home, but Mr Vernon was there in the farmyard, a balding, solid, reliable man doing something to the engine of his Land Rover.
I yammered out my story and he hurried indoors immediately. I heard him calling to his wife in his authoritative middle-class voice: ‘Helen! Vincent Thacker’s had a bad fall from a tree in his garden. Ring for an ambulance, quickly. I’m going back with Janet.’
I ran back ahead of him, down the lane and through our gate and across the potato patch towards the tree where Mum, and Mrs Crackjaw and two or three of her youngest kids, stood watching over the crumpled figure on the grass.
They had lifted off the ladder. Dad lay flung about, legs and arms anyhow, except for his right knee which was raised in the air, bent as though he were doing a cycling exercise. He was moving his head from side to side, and every now and then he let out a gasping moan.
Mum hurried to meet Mr Vernon, and he assured her that an ambulance would be coming. ‘We moved the ladder,’ she gabbled, ‘but now his knee won’t stay down.’
‘Shall we carry him indoors?’ said Mrs Crackjaw, wanting to be involved. She’d been having trouble again, one of her eyes was discoloured and puffy, but the other was goggling as eagerly as her children’s.
Mr Vernon had been bending over Dad, and now he straightened. ‘Best not to try anything ourselves,’ he decided. ‘Might do more harm than good. Best to wait for the ambulance men.’
The Crackjaw kids were hopping round excitedly, stuffing their mouths with handfuls of chips. The smell of fried food was nauseating.
‘Clear off,’ I told them angrily, not caring whether their mother took umbrage or not. ‘Go and eat your dinner at home. And stay there.’
Mrs Crackjaw took no umbrage, but she didn’t take the hint either. Her kids went, but she stayed to extract the maximum interest from poor Dad’s accident. ‘Shall we give him some hot sweet tea?’ she suggested.
‘Certainly not!’ Mr Vernon turned to me. ‘Have you got a blanket to put over him, Janet?’ I ran to get one from my bed, and on the way back met Mum, followed by Mrs Crackjaw. They’d decided to make a pot of tea anyway.
Dad had begun to shiver and sweat at the same time. Mr Vernon helped me to put the blanket over him, avoiding his raised knee. I crouched beside him, pulled my hanky from the pocket of my jeans and mopped his face as gently as I could, brushing off leaves and twigs at the same time. I felt frightened, especially when he moaned. I was thankful that Mr Vernon was there to take charge, but when he bent to move the splintered branch that was jammed under Dad’s back he quickly dropped it muttering, ‘Oh God –’ and I knew then that he was frightened too.
Aloud, Mr Vernon tried to reassure me: ‘He’ll be all right, Janet. The ambulance won’t be long.’
He tried to chat to me about going to college, and I gave him distracted, disjointed answers. Then Mum returned, Mrs Crackjaw still following, carrying a tray of tea. Only she hadn’t brought it in o
ur everyday mugs, she’d gone and got out the best cups and saucers, unused since Christmas, and poured the sugar into a bowl as well.
‘One spoonful or two?’ she asked Mr Vernon in her poshest voice, crooking her little finger genteelly. And we stood about drinking tea while we waited in the September sunshine for the ambulance to come, gazing helplessly at Dad as he lay groaning with his knee bent in the air, trying not to notice that from underneath the blanket a dark liquid was steadily seeping out among the apples on the dusty grass.
In the evening, Mr Vernon kindly drove to Yarchester hospital to pick up Mum, who’d gone with Dad in the ambulance. He was having an operation, and we were to ring the hospital next morning to hear how he was.
Mr Vernon said that we could use the telephone at the farm, to save us going all the way down to the village, but I had to go down in the morning – Sunday – anyway, to see Gran Thacker. I’d biked down the previous evening to tell her what had happened. Now, having had time to get over the shock, she was resentful, demanding to know how long Dad was going to be in hospital and how she could be expected to run the shop single-handed. I used her telephone, and the hospital said that Dad was having to have a second operation; I was to ring again in the evening.
When I got home, Mum was cooking the Sunday dinner as usual. It didn’t seem right, and I was ashamed of feeling hungry, but I was, so I ate it.
I explained to Mum that Gran Thacker was worried about running the shop single-handed, so I’d told her I would help out for the rest of the week. But evidently Mum had been making plans too.
‘I’m glad you’re going to be there,’ she said. ‘I shall need you to give me a start. I’m going to go and serve in the shop meself.’
I was incredulous. ‘You, in the shop?’
‘Why not?’ she said. ‘I worked there for two years afore you were born.’
Cross My Heart and Hope to Die Page 16
