Phyllis Bentley
Ring in the New
Contents
I THE OLD ORDER CHANGES
1 A Good Way to Go
2 Grief
3 Funeral
4 Will
5 House and Home
6 A New Career
7 Susie
II JONATHAN
1 Honeymoon
2 Married Life
3 Finance
4 University
III CHUFF
1 Designer
2 The Urge to Merge
3 Some Shares
4 Negotiations
5 Diversion
6 Merger
IV THE NEW GENERATION
1 Two Sons
2 A Piece of Luck
3 Motherhood for Susie
4 Youth Stirs
5 Susie Defeated
6 Two Daughters
7 Disagreements
8 ‘The Wool is Rising’
9 Demonstration
10 Confrontation
I
The Old Order Changes
1
A Good Way to Go
It was always a bit of a nuisance to catch this early morning London train, thought Morcar, drawing his car neatly between the white lines of the last empty parking place at the station, and applying the brake. One had to wake at the right decidedly early hour, bath, shave, dress, open the garage, drive the car the necessary miles and—most difficult of all—find a parking space. If one arrived too early the cars of the men returning to Annotsfield overnight by sleeper were still in position; a few minutes later they had gone, but the men going to London by this, the first good train of the day, were pouring in to fill the spaces. Indeed Chuff, Morcar’s grandson, grumbled about his attempting this train at all; later ones, he urged, would serve just as well. But this train had many advantages. It was very fast; to reach London from the textile West Riding in under three hours was really splendid. One could keep a business appointment—perhaps two—in the morning, do a business lunch and a couple more business appointments in the afternoon, catch the evening express and sleep in one’s own bed that night and be at the mill first thing next morning. That the train gave a good breakfast and had all seats bookable was also, of course, advantageous, but Morcar made nothing of that; it was business he was after.
These modern young sprigs had no idea what getting business meant in the way of work, he reflected between derision and indulgence as he turned to lock the car; if his grandson Chuff thought a man starting from nothing achieved Syke Mill and Old Syke Mill and Daisy Mill by catching trains at ten o’clock in the morning, he could think again. But catching this train was a bit of a bind, to tell the truth. Still, he had caught it, thought Morcar, smiling happily; he had arrived at exactly the right moment. He put his car keys in his pocket, drew out the necessary silver and turned towards the car park attendant with his customary lively springing step.
His shoe caught on one of the rough protuberances of the stone paving—put down in Victorian times and never since repaired. His ankle twisted and he was thrown violently sideways, his heavy brief case dragged him down, then flew out of his hand; he crashed full-length to the grounds.
‘Ee, Mr Morcar!’ cried the attendant, running towards him. ‘Ee, I am sorry! Are you all right? Are you hurt? You! Come and help him up,’ he shouted, waving to the transport policeman who stood near by.
Morcar was not a particularly heavy man, carrying no superfluous fat, but the two men had some difficulty in raising him, for he seemed unable to help himself. He hung in their arms, flaccid. A grey fluid crawled, viscous, from above his ear to the collar of his handsome London-going suit. His eyes blinked, his mouth gaped a little, but he did not speak.
‘Shock,’ opined the policeman. ‘I’ll fetch a chair.’
‘You’d best ‘phone them at Stanney Royd,’ said the car attendant uneasily.
Between them they managed to prop Morcar on the chair inside the car park attendant’s little hut, and the policeman telephoned for an ambulance which soon arrived.
By the time Chuff arrived at the hospital, however, driving with the speed of panic down the Ire Valley, Morcar was dead. The strong impact of the millstone grit against his temple had fractured his skull.
2
Grief
‘Oh, no. Oh, no!’ exclaimed Jonathan when Chuff telephoned him the terrible news. The month being August, he was at home for the holidays before taking up his new teaching post in the south.
His tone was heartbroken, and Chuff found himself feeling irritated.
‘He was my grandfather, not Jonathan’s,’ he thought. ‘These Oldroyds!’
Of course, he was an Oldroyd himself, on his mother’s side, and proud of it, but the rest of him was Morcar; he had none of that suspect Bamforth streak, which, surviving down a century and a half even though now mingled with Oldroyd blood, made his half-cousin Jonathan, in Chuff’s opinion, soft in the wrong places.
‘Shall I tell Susie?’ said Jonathan quietly.
Chuff groaned. The thought of the grief which his unstable little sister would feel at the loss of her very dearly loved grandfather filled his whole body with anguish. All the same, he felt Jonathan would break it better to Susie than he would himself; they could weep in each other’s arms, he thought savagely, and say soft things such as he could never utter.
‘Yes, tell her.’
‘Should I ask Mother to come down, do you think?’
What would be the good of that? wondered Chuff irritably; everyone at Stanney Royd knew that Susie detested Jonathan’s widowed mother, who had recently remarried; the two were mutually jealous of Jonathan’s affections. Or if we didn’t know it before, we know it now, thought Chuff; somehow Morcar’s death had drained the daylight from the sky and substituted a livid distorting clarity. ‘Why ask me about your mother, anyway?’ he continued silently. It then occurred to him that probably he was his grandfather’s heir and Stanney Royd might well be his. Trust Jonathan to know the proper courtesies in these matters. ‘Do as you like,’ he said roughly. ‘I think I’ll telephone Ruth.’ At the thought of his betrothed, for the first time he felt moisture behind his eyes; in this hour of misery he needed her so greatly.
‘I could fetch her, but I don’t think I ought to leave Susie,’ said Jonathan.
‘No, stay there, I’ll fetch her myself when I can get away from this place.’
He supposed the best way to tackle these frightful things he had to go through was to behave as one did when entering the dentist’s, and say: ‘In an hour or two this will be over.’ But, just as at the dentist’s, it didn’t help; the ordeal still remained to be endured. First there was Ruth and her mother. Mrs Mellor opened the door of their flat to him; the early hour, and Chuff’s face, warned her of disaster, and she looked at him in question.
‘My grandfather’s had an accident. He’s dead,’ blurted Chuff.
‘I’m sorry. He was a good man,’ said Mrs Mellor composedly.
Ruth coming up at this point threw herself on Chuff’s shoulders and burst into tears.
The two things together, Ruth’s sympathy and Mrs Mellor’s calm dismissal of Morcar to the ranks of the dead, maddened Chuff.
‘Come along, Ruth,’ he said roughly, removing her arms from his neck, though at the same time savouring to the full their loving warmth. ‘You must come to Susie.’
Ruth, who knew the need well enough, ran to get her handbag, while Mrs Mellor said gravely: ‘Yes, indeed.’
‘I think I’ll ring up Syke,’ said Chuff. ‘It’ll be a while before I can get there. Nathan’s usually there about this time.’
Mrs Mellor led him to the telephone and left him.
‘Nathan,’ began Chuff.
/> ‘Oh, Mr Chuff! Oh, Mr Chuff!’ cried the works manager, frankly weeping. ‘I’ve heard! We’ve all heard! It’s all over Annotsfield. Oh, how could he! How could it be, Mr Chuff! Surely it can’t be true?’
Somehow this was soothing.
‘I’m afraid it is true, Nathan,’ said Chuff, and though he winced as he spoke, he gave a detailed description of the accident such as he knew the old man would appreciate.
‘Shall I put the flag up at half-mast, Mr Chuff?’ asked Nathan solemnly when this account was closed.
‘Aye, do that,’ said Chuff, using a Yorkshire word consciously for the first time in his life—it seemed appropriate to the occasion.
As he drove Ruth along the Ire Valley, the Syke Mill flag was visible in its mournful position—Nathan had lost no time.
Then there was Stanney Royd, with everyone soaked in grief. Jonathan’s mother, Aunt Jennifer, now Mrs Armitage, sat by the fire with bowed head, tears rolling heavily down her cheeks. Her husband, Nat, stood beside her quiet and still, very much the gentleman; he had heard the news at his mill and rushed home to bring his wife down to Stanney Royd. He stepped forward and offered Chuff his hand.
‘I had a deep respect and affection for Mr Morcar,’ he said. ‘If there’s anything I can do to be of help, Chuff, you’ll let me know?’
‘Thanks,’ said Chuff.
His aunt turned aside her head in a weary motion of distaste. It struck Chuff that Morcar’s death had returned her to the period of her first love, her first marriage, her first husband’s death in the War, when Morcar brought her and her child from bombed London to the safety of Stanney Royd; her second husband seemed to her at the moment an irrelevance. Ironic, thought Chuff, grinning sardonically as he bounded upstairs to Susan’s bedroom. Ruth stood in the open doorway looking anxiously for Chuff, not venturing to go in. As he expected, his sister lay face downward, motionless, on her bed, her thick mane of pale golden hair tossed about her shoulders. Jonathan sat beside her, grave and sad, holding her hand. Or rather, his hand was clutched feverishly in hers; there was tension in every line of her fingers.
‘Susie,’ said Chuff softly.
Susie rolled over and sat up. Her beautiful face, usually of exquisite line and delicate colouring, was now puffed and blurred; her dark blue eyes were red with weeping. She turned a blank look on her brother, then fell back into her previous position as if exhausted. Chuff gave Jonathan an enquiring look which said ‘Hysterics when she heard about grandfather?’, and Jonathan gave a slight affirmative nod. Susie did not move again, and Chuff saw that she did not want either himself or Ruth; she did not want anybody but Jonathan. He repressed a twinge of jealousy firmly, telling himself he must always do, he always wanted to do, the best he could for poor little Susie, and left the room, pushing Ruth rather strongly ahead of him.
‘Don’t you want to stay with Susie?’ murmured Ruth in his ear.
‘No. She’s got Jonathan. I must go and see the solicitors—he may have left instructions about his funeral.’
‘You must have some breakfast first,’ said Ruth quickly, and she went off to direct the distraught Mrs Jessopp to prepare it.
The wretched day dragged its slow length along. Chuff, who had conducted the obsequies of his grandmother under Morcar’s supervision, knew what had to be done and did it competently. The solicitor, the registrar, the undertaker, the vicar. Jonathan demurred over the religious service—‘Uncle Harry was not a believer in the Christian faith,’ he said—but Chuff overbore him.
‘We have to do things decently and in order,’ he said, and he arranged for a service in Marthwaite Church with six men from Syke Mills to act as pall-bearers and all the usual accompaniments of choir, organ, flowers and so on. After the service, the crematorium, in accordance with the wish Morcar had expressed in his will. The drive there would be a longish one, and Chuff proposed that the women of the party should omit this and return from the church direct to Stanney Royd. He said this for Susie’s sake, but Susie indignantly repudiated the suggestion.
Chuff found the most trying feature of that day, and the one which followed, to be the endless enquiries and condolences which came to him by telephone. He had to tell the story of the accident over and over again: to the family, to the men at the mill—Nathan sobbed—to the Mayor of Annotsfield, to every man in textiles (it seemed to Chuff) in Annotsfield, Bradford, Halifax, even Leeds and presently some in London. At first this was in a way a relief; the narration seemed to lift the burden a little, accustoming him to a tragedy for which he had not been prepared. But as the day wore on he began to feel that the words—so banal, so terrible—would choke him if he had to utter them once again. The way they were received also sometimes exasperated his inflamed nerves. Jonathan, for instance, said gravely:
‘Well, it was a good way for him to go.’
‘Nonsense! That’s nonsense, Jonathan!’ raged Chuff. ‘How can you say that? Such a waste!’
‘He was engaged in what he cared for most: textile business,’ said Jonathan as before.
Chuff muttered in fury, but the next time someone on the telephone said sadly: ‘Ee, it does seem a waste; it does that,’ he flew out angrily and told them that Morcar had died at his post, so to speak; he would have liked nothing better, Chuff was sure.
Many people, of course, uttered appreciations of Morcar which consoled Chuff. ‘He was a grand man—straight as a die—I knew him when he was at Annotsfield Tech—always a good designer, you know—ideas of his own—yes, I remember when he began his Thistledowns—he was a fine chap—one of the best—quite a romance, really, how he rose up from nothing, you might say.’
Chuff, repeating this last tribute to the family circle with shy pleasure—’he feels that if Morcar could do that on his own, he can do the same,’ thought Jonathan with his usual perception—was infuriated when Jonathan said:
‘As Hardy said: “Every man’s life seems a poem when you look down into his grave.”’
‘There was nothing poetical about grandfather!’ shouted Chuff angrily. ‘He was a practical man all through.’
‘You don’t understand what I mean,’ said Jonathan.
‘Oh, yes, I do.’
‘Have it your own way’ said Jonathan wearily.
‘I will,’ said Chuff, glaring at him.
Eventually, by putting Ruth on the telephone at Syke Mill, Jonathan at Stanney Royd and Jennifer at Emsley Hall, the enquirers were suitably dealt with while Chuff was absent making necessary arrangements.
In the evening there was a long obituary notice—really a very fine one, so that Chuff felt proud—in the Annotsfield Recorder, and friends from other West Riding towns rang up to say there were agreeable references in their local evening papers. Next morning a short but well informed piece actually appeared in the Yorkshire Post.
‘I ought to keep these, I expect,’ said Chuff uneasily to Ruth.
‘I’ll cut them out for you,’ said Ruth.
Thank goodness Ruth was there; what he would have done without her Chuff could not imagine.
3
Funeral
At last the night—which Jonathan spent wakefully, thinking with remorse of sharp utterances he had perhaps made to Morcar, while Chuff slept the sleep of exhaustion—was over; the morning hours crawled by, and the funeral began. It was a tremendous affair; the Iredale Road was black with cars, the police had great difficulty in marshalling them anywhere near Marth-waite Church and many textile notabilities had to walk several hundred yards in a drizzling rain.
The English are good at ceremonies, reflected Jonathan; they are decorous, they have a great sense of what is fitting and proper; they are patient and do not push, they do exactly what they have promised to do, they don’t get excited, or weep obviously, or sing hymns loudly; they pay attention to what is going on and show respect by a grave demeanour. The beauty of the words of the Prayer Book funeral service is really outstanding. The hymns today were well-chosen, the flowers handsome, the vicar’s a
ddress short but adequate; Chuff, who with Susie of course led the family cortege into the church, looked no longer a lad but a responsible young man, blunt featured, determined, well able to cope with anything which might require action. Susie looked so exceedingly beautiful and so fragile that every male heart in the church, Jonathan felt sure, yearned over her. Ruth and her brother G.B. looked grave but stolid, in complete self-control. Jennifer wore mourning, perfectly plain but of the highest elegance; Nat, limping beside her, looked what he was, a soldier and a gentleman of high integrity, but not really a textile manufacturer. Nathan and Mrs Jessopp wept quietly. In a word—‘and I have noticed this before,’ thought Jonathan—‘people behave on great occasions like themselves.’
As he stood there, very still, his eyes suitably cast down, he allowed his thoughts to roam over the history of his family, which had now again come to a turning-point. In 1812 the Luddites of this valley, protesting against the introduction of cropping frames into their hand industry, led by George Mellor, in spite of the protests of Joe Bamforth, a man innocent and mild, had murdered a millowner, William Oldroyd. Though the murderers were hanged and the Oldroyds prospered, through the vicissitudes of loves and hates kinsmen of all who had played a part in that evil deed stood in this church today. He himself, mingled Bamforth and Oldroyd stock, held firm to what he regarded as Bamforth principles—peace, brotherhood, tolerance. Ruth and her brother were Mellors; though not in the least a murderer, G.B. had an aggressive note which increased as he grew older. Into the Oldroyd-Bamforth-Mellor story had come Hairy Morcar, a man of great textile skill, determined, able, clear-sighted, not blinded by hate, but alienated from his wife and son—by her doing, Jonathan felt sure, though he did not know that story exactly. He reflected with a little bitterness that Chuff and Susie Morcar were children of this alienated son. Morcar had loved, too late, Jonathan’s grandmother, whose photograph in the prime of her great beauty always stood alone in his private room. When she perished with her husband in a London air-raid, Morcar had rescued her daughter Jennifer, then with child by her Oldroyd husband, and brought her to live in safety in the Ire Valley with himself and his old mother. Her child was Jonathan, and he remembered well now in this sad hour how as a toddler he had trotted along the Stanney Royd paths, his hand in Morcar’s, chattering and pointing, relying in complete unthinking confidence on Morcar’s love and care. It came on him like a flash:
Ring in the New Page 1
