A Gathering Storm

by Rachel Hore

‘No, of course not, I’m sorry.’

  Miss Pettifer sighed. She opened a drawer and took out a sheet of writing paper, then unscrewed her fountain pen. When she had finished the letter, she passed it across the desk to Beatrice.

  ‘You’ll need this reference,’ she said. ‘I’ll speak to your mother and explain that we can’t force you to stay, especially since you’ve been offered war work. But be sure to write to them every week. They worry about you.’

  ‘I know,’ Beatrice whispered.

  ‘You’re an unusual girl,’ Miss Pettifer said. ‘But resilient, I think. I remember, when I was your age . . .’ The Headmistress, who had always seemed so poised, gave her a girlish smile. ‘But life is different for women now. Perhaps you will have chances that I never had. Beatrice, I sense your path may not be smooth. “Follow the truth.” That’s what we try to teach our girls here.’

  ‘The school motto,’ Beatrice said.

  ‘That’s right. But I must give you another piece of advice.’ She leant forward slightly. ‘Follow your heart.’

  Beatrice nodded, not quite sure what she meant, but felt a thrill pass through her all the same.

  ‘And now I think our little interview is over. You’ll attend lessons for the duration, and when you do leave, it’ll have to be quietly. I don’t want to unsettle the other girls.’

  ‘Of course. Thank you, Miss Pettifer.’

  ‘Perhaps you’ll find time occasionally to write. I like to hear how our girls get on.’

  Beatrice nodded, and shook the outstretched hand.

  She took the letter up to her dormitory, intending to pass it on to Captain Browning unread, but when she made to place it in her drawer she saw that the envelope was unsealed. Miss Pettifer, perhaps, had intended her to know its contents. To whom it may concern, it started. She read on, amazed.

  I would like to commend to you most warmly Beatrice Marlow, a pupil at my school for the last two years. She is one of the most naturally intelligent young women I have come across, in addition to which she has a strong sense of duty and loyalty. I find in her diligence, physical toughness and a quiet strength of character. I sense she will do great things.

  Dizzy with astonishment, Beatrice read it again. For the first time in her life she felt she was someone who mattered.

  Chapter 14

  Leicestershire, July 1940

  ‘Bert’s vicious; you’ve got to watch him. Look what he did to me a few weeks back, the tinker.’ The girl, Tessa, pulled her overall down her shoulder to show Beatrice a puckered bite wound marring her creamy shoulder, still livid. ‘Didn’t half hurt, I can tell you.’

  ‘That’s awful,’ Beatrice said, looking up nervously at the great bay horse in his stall. ‘What’s with matter with his eye?’ The horse flicked his ears back and watched them warily out of one rolling eyeball. The lid of the other drooped. Now she was growing used to the gloom of the stable she could make out long scars on his flank and chest. ‘Why, the poor old thing. Who did that?’

  Tessa shrugged. ‘He’s an old cavalry charger. Came off the boat from India. He’s not the only one to be badly treated there. No wonder he likes to get his own back on humans.’

  ‘How could anyone do that?’ Beatrice whispered, putting out her hand to the animal, but Bert backed away.

  ‘Careful,’ Tessa said. ‘It’s shameful, that’s what it is, hurting an innocent beast.’

  They moved on past him to the next stall. ‘This one’s Sunny. By name and nature.’ Tessa rubbed the nose of a gentle grey mare. ‘Yes, you’re a darling, aren’t you? And them two over there –’ a pair of quiet draught horses ‘– are Pip and Wilfred.’

  Beatrice patted them and stared along the long line of stalls, wondering how many horses there were in here – two dozen perhaps, and this was only one of many rows of shelters at the depot.

  It was her first day. She’d arrived by train at the Midlands market town the previous evening and found her way easily to the address Captain Browning had given her. Miss Catherine Warrender, her landlady, lived in a pretty, pebble-studded townhouse, the short front garden rampant with hollyhocks. Miss Warrender herself was a tall, heavily built woman in her fifties, with a deep, cultured voice and a cheerful disposition. She knew Colonel Flanders who was in charge of the depot, which is why she’d been asked to put up Beatrice. Beatrice liked her at once and liked the comfortable bedroom she was given, which looked out onto a small orchard with a beehive, and a pair of tethered goats, later introduced to her as ‘my girls, Moony and Belinda.’

  ‘Dinner’s at seven and the water will be hot at six. I expect you’ll like to wash and change after you’ve been with the horses.’ Miss Warrender left her to unpack.

  Dinner, it turned out, was prepared by Miss Warrender herself, as was everything else in the house. Beatrice discerned that she’d fallen on hard times and was probably grateful to have a lodger.

  Today, Captain Browning, fortyish, pale and flabby, had given her several forms to sign before handing her into the care of an ageing NCO with a rough countryman’s face. This was Sergeant Dally, the head groom.

  Sergeant Dally had greeted her without meeting her eye. As she walked with him across the stableyard he remarked, ‘We don’t want women here. They upset everything.’ Then he left her with this local girl, Tessa Hill, one of only two other females at the depot.

  ‘Don’t let ‘im get to you,’ Tessa whispered, seeing Beatrice’s stricken face. ‘Once the men see we do the work same as them, they treat us all right,’ she said. ‘Oh, and you have not to mind the language.’

  Tessa helped Beatrice pick out the smallest pair of overalls from the store, though these were still baggy on her, and was now showing her the half-dozen horses and ponies she was being allocated to feed, muck out and groom every day. ‘And that’s before the exercising and the training, I’m warning you,’ she said. ‘Come on, we’d better get started.’

  Beatrice loved the job at once, though it was hard physical work and she got very tired. Sometimes, waking in the mornings, her legs and hips felt weak and tingly a result of the polio, she supposed, and she’d lie there willing herself to get up. That was the only time she allowed her thoughts to crowd in.

  The work did help keep her mind off things, in particular the awful dragging anxiety about Rafe. It was always there, in the background, but most of the time she was too busy or too tired to think about it. Sometimes she asked herself why she’d come, and it gradually dawned on her that she’d been running away, just running, without knowing where she was running to. It wasn’t a bad place that she’d found herself. She didn’t know how long she’d stay here, but for the moment it suited her.

  The majority of the horses were being trained to pull heavy wagons. Tessa didn’t know where they would end up; maybe in terrain where trucks couldn’t go, it was supposed, or where there was no petrol. Some would become police horses, and some of the more aristocratic steeds would be used for ceremonial duties.

  It was pointless, Beatrice quickly discovered, to become too attached to her animals, for the easier ones like Stanley, the big hunter, would stay for as little as a few weeks, before being loaded into one of the trailers and taken off heavens knew where. It would have to be enough for her to know that she was giving them a short period of kindness before some possibly dark fate overtook them.

  There were one or two other men who shared Sergeant Dally’s world view, but most of them did accept the women without question. Sturdy Tessa was a farmer’s daughter of nineteen with a furze-bush of fair hair, and well used to sharing heavy work with men. The third woman, Sarah, was a different kind altogether: dark-haired and mysterious. Probably in her late twenties, tremendously voluptuous, there was a sad, brooding air about her. She was pleasant to Tessa and Beatrice, but didn’t brook confidences. While over their lunchtime sandwich and cups of strong sweet tea Tessa talked enthusiastically about Ted, her childhood sweetheart, who wrote postcards to her from an RAF camp in Kent where he was ground crew, S
arah said nothing, but stared into the distance and turned a gold ring she wore on the fourth finger of her right hand. There was one thing everyone valued about Sarah: while the girls were all devoted to the animals in their care, Sarah seemed to have an uncanny ability with them, quieting even the most nervous and badly treated. It was as though she understood them. Even Bert never tried to bite Sarah.

  They were out in all weathers. The horses had to be exercised and Beatrice quickly became familiar with the local network of country roads and bridleways. Then there was the training.

  The problem, inevitably, was Bert. One morning, a fortnight after she arrived, Sergeant Dally decided Bert should be tried on a wagon for the first time. Beatrice was nervous, but she didn’t dare show it. She muzzled him, and by holding him on a short rein and firmly coaxing, managed to wheel him round and back him into his place next to Stanley. After a couple of false starts, she led them successfully about the field and was pleased with his progress. Stanley was clearly a calming influence.

  The watching Sergeant wasn’t satisfied, though, and it wasn’t long before he strode across and commanded, ‘See how they go with you riding upfront.’

  ‘I don’t think he’s ready for that,’ Beatrice said carefully, but Dally’s rough reply was, ‘Do as you’re ordered,’ so she shrugged and climbed into the driver’s seat while Dally held the horses’ heads.

  She fumbled with the reins, but before she was ready the Sergeant shouted, ‘Away you go,’ then to her horror, he struck Bert on his imperious rump. The horses surged forward with such a jerk that Beatrice had trouble keeping her seat, and for a moment she lost all control. She held on for dear life, the wagon bumping from side to side and the shaft in front swinging about and hitting the horses. She righted herself quickly, crying out, ‘Stop!’ and pulling on the reins, but the only effect this had was to make Bert rear in a sudden panic and she felt the wagon fly up too. The shaft hit her in the face before she was tipped onto the ground, the wagon just missing her. She was aware of the horses struggling, whinnying with pain and panic.

  A hue and cry started up; people came running.

  ‘Are you all right, miss?’ a man’s voice, then the shaft of the wagon was lifted off . ‘Don’t try to move,’ he said. ‘Where do you hurt?’ She couldn’t see for the blood running in her eyes but felt firm fingers on her neck, searching for the pulse, then brushing back her hair to examine the wound.

  She could hear a woman’s voice now, Sarah’s, soothing the horses, and the clink of their bindings.

  ‘How are you doing?’ came the man’s voice. She opened her eyes and found herself focusing on a kind face with eyes the same chestnut colour as her own. The name Shaw, Corporal Shaw, drifted through her mind before she passed out.

  On the doctor’s orders, she spent two days in bed. On the morning of the third day she awoke feeling much better, though her forehead was still swollen and bruised and it hurt to breathe. She struggled out of bed and when she went to draw the curtains was met by an amusing sight. Miss Warrender, clothed in white from head to foot and wearing her gas mask against a cloud of smoke, was collecting honey from the hive. The goats, removed safely to a far corner, gazed astonished at the sight.

  Beatrice dressed as quickly as she could and went downstairs. There she was watching from the kitchen window, nursing a cup of tea, when her landlady bustled in carrying a frame of dripping honeycomb.

  ‘My dear, are you sure you should be out of bed?’ Miss Warrender asked, pulling off her gas mask. She began scraping the honey onto a large metal tray, stopping only to remove the odd trapped bee with a teaspoon.

  ‘I feel a great deal better,’ Beatrice said. ‘Oh, there’s one on your arm, look. And another on your back. Stay still.’ And she trapped the sleepy bees one by one in a tea towel and shook them off outside. When she returned, it was to find one more insect drowsing on the table. She marvelled at the smallness of it, the plainness, before catching it up in the cloth.

  Miss Warrender, scraping away, said, ‘It’s wonderful to think that something so small and insignificant has such an important place in the world. If it didn’t perform its duty then fruit and flowers wouldn’t be pollinated and we wouldn’t have this lovely honey.’

  ‘And what if it didn’t do its duty?’ Beatrice said from the doorway. ‘Would the other bees punish it?’

  Miss Warrender appeared to consider this. ‘I don’t know. They might turn on it. But it always does do its duty. What it’s created to do.’

  ‘I expect you’re right,’ Beatrice said. ‘Now if you’ll excuse me I ought to get off to work.’

  ‘You shall not,’ Miss Warrender said, washing honey off her hands. ‘You took a terrific bash, girl, and this is your first day up.’

  ‘But I feel fine. Just a bit shaken.’ The bump on her forehead did throb, though.

  ‘You’re not stepping outside my front door till the doctor’s seen you again. You could have been killed, you know – that’s what he said.’

  ‘Did he? I don’t remember. Miss Warrender, I must thank you for looking after me.’

  ‘Not at all. It takes me back to my days driving ambulances at the front.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘I was with the FANY over in Belgium. You will have heard of us – the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry. We saw some awful things. But it was the most thrilling time of my life. You wouldn’t know when you woke up in the morning what you might have to get through that day.’

  Through conversations over dinner, Beatrice had gleaned small nuggets of information about Catherine Warrender. That she’d been born in a big house with servants, but her father had died when she was fourteen, leaving only debts, and the family had moved to this townhouse; that she’d nursed her mother through her final illness; that she taught first aid to local volunteers. But of her inner life she gave little away. Beatrice saw her love of her garden and of animals – she could often be heard calming her ‘girls’ with soothing nonsense as she milked them or fed them soft-scented clover hay. She was a woman who did her duty willingly and without complaint.

  ‘I’m so grateful for your kindness,’ Beatrice told Miss Warrender now, and she felt the warmth of affection in the woman’s smile.

  ‘I think you are much better, Beatrice. I’m so relieved. You’re a brave girl with those horses. By the way, a Corporal Shaw has been here asking after you.’

  Beatrice heard her, but as from a long way off . In a sharp flash of memory she was seeing Sergeant Dally strike the terrified Bert with his crop. And the vicious expression in the Sergeant’s eyes.

  Her mistake was to have said anything.

  Pudgy Captain Browning listened to her carefully with a blank expression on his face, then took a piece of rough paper out of a drawer and wrote something on it.

  He said, ‘I’ll speak to him about it. You can go now.’

  ‘But,’ she broke in, ‘aren’t you going to ask me any more about it? Isn’t there a procedure?’

  ‘I said I’d speak to the Colonel about it. And he’ll do as he sees fit. We haven’t had any trouble before now with the ladies.’ He gave the word a little mocking emphasis. She thought perhaps he hadn’t fully understood.

  ‘Look, Captain. Sergeant Dally struck the horse. He knew Bert was difficult. He must have known how the poor boy would react. But I think he wanted to hurt me. He doesn’t like me, I can tell.’

  All that happened was that everything got much worse for her after that. If there was ever a tricky or particularly dirty job, Sergeant Dally would be sure to pick her out for it. He’d criticize everything she did, too. She spent a long afternoon with Stuart Shaw, the man who had rescued her, training some of the pedigree mounts for ceremonial duties, laughing and chatting with him as they rode round a muddy field to tinny brass band music from a wind-up gramophone, but it was only her that Dally shouted at when a horse put a step wrong. She tried to take it all without comment, biting the inside of her lip to stem the anger, leading the animal away withou
t a backward look at the two men.

  Tessa had little sympathy for her. ‘Surely you know,’ she told her crossly as they filled the mangers with hay and lugged pails of water for the horses to drink, ‘Dally and the Colonel go right back. Dally was his batman in India. Probably saved him from a tiger or an armed tribesman. No one can say a word to him against Dally.’

  ‘Someone might have told me that before,’ Beatrice said, forlorn.

  ‘It’s not just that, though. They’re not used to us women here. They think we’re weak if we complain.’

  Beatrice felt tears prickle, but imagined Tessa would think her silly, so she blinked them away. Later, when she was alone, she was sure the horses sensed her unhappiness, for Sunny nuzzled her shoulder and Pip and Wilfrid watched her, solid and patient. A bucket broke, spilling feed everywhere. ‘Oh, fidget!’ she cried. Snatching up a broom, she began sweeping it up with brisk angry strokes.

  A shadow fell across the floor, and she looked up to see Stuart Shaw standing in the doorway. He had changed out of his overalls and his shirt lay softly open at the neck.

  ‘Sorry if I startled you,’ he said. He stepped over to pet Sunny, who was everyone’s favourite. ‘Oh, you know I’ve got something, do you?’ he told the pony, as she nudged at his jacket. He extracted a couple of runtish apples from a pocket and fed her one. The other he balanced on the gate of Bert’s stall, where the charger rolled his eyes at it for a moment before taking it into his mouth.

  ‘Thank you, he’s enjoying that,’ Beatrice told Stuart. Though comfortable with him, she felt intensely aware of his interest in her. He helped her shovel up the sweepings, then waited as she hung up her overalls.

  ‘I pass your lodgings. I’ll walk with you, if you like,’ he said.

  She waited while he collected a battered bicycle from the side of the office. It was a warm evening, and the song of a pair of skylarks took her straight to the fields above St Florian. For a moment she imagined it was Rafe walking beside her, not a near-stranger, and she struggled against a wave of sadness.