Shadow on the Land

by Anne Doughty

  She had looked forward to her regular twice-weekly visit to the Cooks, always a source of news and lively stories, but today the time she had spent there had been both wearing and agitating. Normally the most outgoing of women, seldom without a fund of conversation or even of monologue, Mary wasn’t herself at all. Though a much less talkative person, Michael too was surprisingly quiet. His widowed father had arrived for a visit and, from the moment she’d been introduced he’d taken over the conversation and more than made up for both.

  Emily had said, ‘Good afternoon,’ and commented how nice it was to have such a pleasant spell of dry, sunny weather. Immediately, the older man had protested. It was all very well for women spring-cleaning and getting the Monday washing dry and suchlike, but if this dryness went on then the milk yields would be down and forby Michael would have to feed hay to make up for the shortage of new grass and sure look at the price of hay, even if it were available in the first place.

  Emily would have been more than happy to pick up her supplies and leave, but courtesy required she stay at least fifteen minutes and exchange news. Not that there was any news from Rathdrum, certainly none she wanted to share, but to begin with she did her best by enquiring about a setting of eggs Mary wanted for a broody hen and confirming the plans for the next children’s outing.

  ‘You’d think those American boys out the road had better things to do than run around with a lot of children,’ Mr Cook announced, finally dropping down into a fireside chair, just as Emily thought his hovering awkwardly meant that he might be about to leave. ‘We’re hardly goin’ to beat the Jerries with all that lot are doin’. Why aren’t they out with them convoys that are gettin’ sunk left, right and centre? If these U-boats have it all their own way shure they’ll starve us out. Isn’t that exactly what Hitler wants to do?’

  ‘Now Da, be reasonable,’ said Michael coolly. ‘These young lads are still trainin’ to be engineers. One soldier is not the same as another. Different men do different jobs.’

  ‘All right, I give you that,’ he said abruptly. ‘They’d be no use out there in the Atlantic. So what are they doing marchin’ roun’ the place here with their faces black, if they’re engineers?’ he went on, grinning and showing his small, brown teeth, as he took his pipe out of his pocket.

  ‘An’ I’ll tell ye somethin’ else,’ he said, fixing them all with his eye, ‘some of these dances and socials and what have ye, for the troops, as they say, are open to all comers. And who d’ye think comes? Girls from over the border. As nice as ye please, their clothes aren’t on coupons, are they? And then they go back with all the details of which regiment is here and which regiment is there and what every one of them’s doin’. Shure we might as well ring up Mr de Valera or the German embassy in Dublin and tell them all our business in the first place,’ he said, applying a match to his pipe and breaking off while he sucked furiously to get it going.

  ‘An I’ll tell ye more forby, for ye don’t seem to have one bit of a notion here what’s going on. If ye go down to Dublin and into one of these posh hotels you’ll see it full of people from the North and there sitting beside them as large as life these Nazis with their swastikas, eating and drinking and chatting away as if they were at home in Berlin.’

  Emily had said nothing. Many well off Northerners went down to Dublin for weekends to escape the black out and the general weariness of wartime. Her own friend Dolly Love, from Dromore had gone down with her husband to visit her sister on her birthday. They’d no sooner sat down in the restaurant where they’d booked a special meal than some men in German uniform sat down at the next table. Arthur Love fought in the first war and was so incensed, he’d marched them straight out. Poor Dolly had been so looking forward to her dinner. Back home, all her sister could produce for them was scrambled egg.

  ‘Da, if the South is neutral, then anyone has the right to be there. There’s Americans and British in Dublin as well, in uniform and out of it,’ Michael said coolly.

  ‘Neutral, ma foot. Yer man is hand in glove with Hitler. And Hitler’s just biding his time to invade. Sure, isn’t it the best way to get at England?’

  Emily was beginning to wonder just whose side Cook senior was on. His reference to England was just as hostile as his reference to the Germans in Dublin.

  ‘Well, maybe, Da, we might be grateful yet for the wee American lads with their guns to give us a han’ when the Jerries come up the road from the South,’ said Michael quietly. ‘Right now I have cows to milk.’

  ‘And I have washing to bring in and a meal to cook,’ said Emily, as she stood up quickly and moved across the room to where Mary was standing by the entrance to the dairy, waiting for her, her eyes cast up in a heavenward glance as Cook senior clumped out through the back door without a backward glance or a word of farewell.

  ‘Emily, what am ah goin’ to do? He’s here for three more weeks, an’ he never stops. It’s the Germans and the South and de Valera. Mornin’ noon and night. An’ he thinks our postman is spyin’ for them, because he asked me how my brother was. Sure the two of them were at school together till Jimmy joined up. But you can’t tell him anythin’. What am ah goin’ to do?’

  Mary turned a tearful glance towards Emily as she refilled her clean milk bottles and put their tops on, wrapped her eggs to fit the small cardboard box that had been going up and down the hill for years now and then opened her larder for butter.

  ‘Oh Mary, I am sorry,’ said Emily. ‘I don’t know what I would do,’ she added honestly. ‘I’d like to tell him to shut up, but then, if he were Alex’s father, I’d probably not feel I could do that any more than you can. Why does he come here?’

  ‘He gets lonely, Michael says, since Ma died. Sure he has no friends.’

  ‘I’m not surprised,’ said Emily, watching Mary as she deftly wrapped her butter in a sheet of greaseproof paper and then in the clean tea towel Emily had brought with her.

  ‘An’ we’ll have none left by the time he goes,’ Mary added crossly.

  Emily laughed.

  ‘Oh Mary dear, don’t worry about that,’ she said, handing over her money in a battered envelope. ‘They’ll all be back as soon as he goes. It might even be good for us all to have no news and no good stories for a while. Then we’d appreciate them all the more,’ she added smiling. ‘I’ll maybe send Alex down on Tuesday and see if he does any better than I did. I don’t think your father-in-law has much time for women, has he?’

  ‘No, he never had,’ Mary agreed, shaking her head. ‘I don’t know how Michael’s Ma put up with him. But now he’s lost without her.’

  ‘Don’t let him get you down, Mary,’ Emily said encouragingly, as she picked up her loaded bag. ‘Three weeks does seems a long time, but if we can stick three years of war, we can stick three weeks of your man, can’t we?’

  Mary managed a weak smile.

  ‘Aye, we can and I’ll be lookin’ forward to seein’ you and our friends at the Church Hall on Friday next. At least the wee ones will have a smile for us. I think yer man’s face would crack if he tried it.’

  Emily enjoyed her walk. Though the bag began to feel heavy by the time she’d passed the steepest part of the hill she was still glad to be outdoors and grateful for the same dry weather that had so irritated Michael’s father. Thanks to it, she was well ahead in the garden, the soil now easy to turn after three years of crops and digging in compost. It had been a real triumph for her to do something she’d never done before and know what she was doing was worth all the effort.

  She wasn’t the only one who must feel pleased at her success. So far, producing food had been Ulster’s best response to the war. While the farmers in England, Scotland and Wales had reached the targets for opening up new land by ploughing fallow and meadow and even digging up the London parks and gardens, in Ulster they had excelled themselves, far exceeded the targets they’d been set.

  Their efforts helped to make up for the half-hearted start to war production she’d read about in all th
e papers for the first couple of years of the war. She still wondered how the Stormont government could have managed to do so little in the face the huge demands the war created that unemployment had actually gone up. Worse still, there’d been even more labour troubles than during the severe depression of the thirties.

  Perhaps, she thought, catching some hair out of her eyes, there was now a wind of change blowing. If they got the new government as most people thought was about to happen, then they would be active in stepping up production. If farmers and gardeners could do so well producing food, surely factory workers could make more planes and munitions, but people needed to be encouraged to do their best.

  She remembered how, right at the beginning of the war, the farmers had each had a personal letter from Basil Brooke, the Minister of Agriculture. Michael Cook had showed her his letter which he still kept, for he said doubling the herd was the best thing that had ever happened to his farm. There must have been many more encouraged by that same letter, written as one farmer to another, though Brook’s estates at Coalbrook were enormous compared to the handful of acres of people like Michael.

  If there was one thing in particular she had learnt from Chris Hicks and his boys, it was that individuals really need to feel what they are doing is worthwhile. They also need to feel they themselves are valued.

  Thank goodness there weren’t many like Michael Cook’s father around, she thought to herself, as she passed through the always open gates of Rathdrum. Hitler ought to recruit more like him. Perhaps he already had. Perhaps Cook senior was a secret weapon for undermining morale. Undermining someone as irrepressible as Mary took some doing.

  Emily laughed as she tramped down the drive. Wasn’t it strange the silly things came into your mind when you were free to walk at your own pace with no one expecting you and no particular need to hurry, not even to save yourself from getting wet.

  She was completely taken aback when she came round the corner of the house and saw a jeep parked by the back door. To her surprise, there was no one in it.

  She looked around the yard and peered down what was visible of the garden path as she opened the back door and lowered her bag gratefully onto the table. At that instant, the door to the hall opened and a tall, blonde young man in uniform appeared.

  ‘Oh thank goodness, ma’am, I was afraid something was wrong,’ he said hastily. ‘The door was open, but you weren’t in the garden. I was sure you wouldn’t leave the door unlocked, so I went looking for you. I’m so sorry, I hope you don’t think …’

  He broke off looking flustered and awkward.

  ‘That I thought you might be going to steal the family silver or were inspecting to see if I’d dusted under the beds,’ she offered, laughing.

  To her relief, the stricken look on his face disappeared and he smiled.

  ‘Well, it’s not funny to come into your own house and find a stranger looking round,’ he said apologetically.

  ‘But, you’re not a stranger. You’re Hank the Tank and you are also Alexander Lachlan Ross. I can’t imagine any harm coming from a man with a name like that. Besides, you were concerned about me. That was very kind of you. I must confess, I never lock the door when I’m just going down the hill for the milk. Maybe, I should in future.’

  ‘Well, perhaps …’

  ‘You’re perfectly right. Now, sit down while I put the kettle on. Whatever it is you’ve come for, as Major Hicks might say: ‘I could sure use a cup of coffee’ How about you?’

  ‘Yes, ma’am, I could indeed.’

  Emily put a tray together so that they could sit in the conservatory with the last of the afternoon sunshine.

  ‘Now, do have some cake,’ she said, cutting him a generous slice. ‘Without you, there wouldn’t be much fruit in it and without you I wouldn’t have any coffee either. Do you mind being called Hank or shall I use your other names?’

  ‘Call me what you like, ma’am, if you give me cake like this,’ he said appreciatively as he swallowed the first mouthful. ‘There’s a saying we have at home, Call me anything you like except too early in the morning.’

  Emily laughed and decided his accent was definitely Canadian, not American.

  ‘Yes, we have that one here too. But then, it’s hardly surprising you know the saying when your name is a good Scots name like Ross and Ulster is full of Rosses. Do you know where your family came from?’

  ‘Well, my father’s family actually came into Ontario from Nova Scotia. My great-grandfather started writing the whole story in the front of the family Bible from the time they left Scotland on a ship called Polly in 1810,’ he began, smiling gently. ‘We don’t actually know about my mother’s family. She was adopted by Lachlan and Fiona Ross in Quebec, in 1895, and then they moved west to farm in Saskatchewan. She married my father, George Ross, out there and I was born in Saskatoon, but he was a lawyer and his uncle had a practice in Boston, so he moved back into the States to take over from him when he retired. I’d have been joining the firm as soon as I’d done with College if I hadn’t joined up.’

  ‘How very interesting, Hank,’ said Emily, looking into the candid blue eyes. ‘I’m fascinated by the way people move around on that great continent of yours. So many people here in Ireland live for generations in the same place,’ she went on, ‘that is, if they stay.

  ‘But of course, thousands of them go and you yourself have got the names to prove it. Alexander, Lachlan and Ross are all Ulster or Ulster-Scots names. Usually here, families call children after relatives. There’s a tradition that you call the first boy after his father’s father and the first girl after her mother’s mother and so on down the family. It can create dreadful confusion. My friends John and Rose Hamilton used to have two Uncle Sam’s and a son Sam and later a grandson, Sam as well,’ she ended laughing.

  ‘I didn’t know that tradition about naming,’ he said nodding thoughtfully. ‘My grandfather was Lachlan and my father was Lachlan but you know, I never knew anyone called Alexander till I met your husband.’

  ‘That is strange, isn’t it?’ Emily responded, suddenly curious to hear more. ‘Why do you think your mother called you that?’

  ‘Well, it’s a bit of a family story,’ he said smiling. ‘Ma always insisted she had a brother, but even when she was first adopted my grandparents thought she might be romancing. She had several ‘brothers’ she played with when she was five or six. They never knew what age she was. They just collected her from the ship with her little suitcase.

  ‘She still has the suitcase,’ he added looking at her directly. ‘She kept it because her brother had written her name on it, so no one could take it from her. She said his name was Alexander.’

  ‘How remarkable,’ said Emily, suddenly seeing the lines of blue text on the carbon copy Brendan had sent her back in January.

  Another child sent out across the ocean. Clearly Hank’s mother didn’t have a label on her coat, so there was even less chance of finding out where she had come from.

  ‘Any idea what year that would have been, Hank?’

  ‘Oh yes, Grandpa Ross recorded it in the family Bible. I used to look at it often when I was a kid. He wrote; 26th May 1895. Today, we drove to Quebec and there by the grace of God did receive into our care a girl orphan from Liverpool, England, a longed for daughter.’

  ‘My goodness, what a happy landing for that child,’ she said, aware of tears suddenly springing to her eyes. ‘I’ve been reading about the boatloads of orphans sent to Canada. A hundred thousand between 1865 and 1935. Did you know that?’

  ‘No, ma’am.’

  He looked shocked, his eyes wide and troubled.

  ‘Neither did I till last January,’ she said honestly. ‘We’d been talking about Canadian orphans to our bookseller cousin from Dublin and he discovered his colleague knew a great deal more than he did. He sent me some of the material from the book his friend is working on. You know, of course, that my Alex was an orphan, don’t you?’

  ‘No, ma’am,’ he said, loo
king quite taken aback. ‘I knew your husband came back from Canada to find his family, but I didn’t know he’d gone out as an orphan. I thought his family had emigrated and then when he lost his parents he came back to find his aunts and uncles.’

  ‘No, Alex was sent off, just like your mother,’ Emily said, shaking her head, ‘only he had a label on his coat that said Alex Hamilton. Perhaps boys didn’t have suitcases …’

  She broke off, once again overwhelmed by the enormity of what had happened to these two children such a long time ago.

  ‘Don’t look so sad, ma’am,’ he said quietly. ‘They haven’t done so bad. My mother is a lovely lady, I know you’d like her and Mr Hamilton is a very successful man. All the boys are pleased when there’s work to do at the mills. He never hassles them, but he keeps them right. He’s good to them.’

  Whenever he spoke, he always looked straight at her and in those wide, blue eyes she could see exactly what he was thinking. She was touched at his trying to encourage her, because he saw she was sad. Just what her youngest daughter would have done.

  ‘You’re right, Hank, it’s all a long time ago. Isn’t it strange that we can be so sad about what happened to your mother and my husband nearly fifty years ago when all around us thousands are dying every day?’

  ‘No ma’am,’ he said firmly. ‘It’s not comparable. Being sad is part of being human. If we didn’t feel such feelings, then we wouldn’t be fighting Hitler. If we want to win, we need to know what we think is wrong, like sending those children away.’

  She nodded, startled by the strength of his tone and his clear conviction.

  ‘Ma’am, I do so enjoy talking to you, even apart from the coffee and the cake …’

  ‘Hank, I’m sorry, it’s my fault entirely. Of course you must get back. Did you have a message for me?’