South Riding

by Winifred Holtby

He lit the tall silver candles on the mantelpiece; he poked the fire to a roaring blaze; the lights picked out the gold of brass, the deep ruddy warmth of old mahogany, the crimson carpet. A tray stood on the table holding a heavy cut-glass decanter and covered dishes. A kettle stood warm upon the hearth.

  Without consulting her he poured out a stiff peg of whisky, added hot water, sugar, lemon, and handed the glass to her.

  “You’d better drink this.”

  “Thank you.”

  She felt better for it; living heat ran through her; she crouched close to the fire. He looked down at her.

  “You’re frozen.”

  “Frozen, soaked and dead,” she grinned up at him.

  “Wait a minute.”

  He stumbled out of the room and she heard him clumping over stone flags; a door closed. She thought; he is the oddest, rudest man I ever met. She remembered, with queer rapture, the harmony of that shared effort. She thought of his fey difficult child and wondered what the wife and mother had been like. Miss Sedgmire. A hunting beauty. Shut away, insane.

  She looked around her curiously. In its warm half-light of fire and candle flame, she could see the faded dignity of the big room, the array of glass and silver on the sideboard, the table where twenty might sit down together, the bases of gilded frames.

  Above the mantelpiece hung a big oil painting veiled in shadow. I wonder, she murmured.

  She took the candles from the mantelpiece, holding them high in their tall silver sticks above her head; she stepped backwards from the fireplace and looked up.

  The portrait of a girl in a dark riding habit leapt into light. She was holding her hat and crop, and her auburn hair framed softly her narrow pointed face that was like Midge’s and yet was beautiful. The curve from high cheek-bone to chin was flawless; the post of the perfectly set head on the slender neck a design for arrogance; the eyes, wide, brown and startled, gazed with imperious wonder at the intruding stranger.

  “Oh!” cried Sarah softly. “Oh!”

  For she knew who this must be, and looking at that wild unstable loveliness, she no longer found it amusing that a farmer who had married this baron’s daughter should be striving to maintain against ruin and failure the dignity he thought suitable to his wife’s position, though she was shut away in a mental hospital.

  She had thought of Carne’s story as an entertaining and rather cruel fable of snobbery punished by its own achievement. She realised now that it was something more.

  Oh, poor things, poor things, she thought. Perhaps she even spoke the words aloud.

  “I think it might be a good idea, Miss Burton,” said a deep voice behind her, “if you had a hot bath. There is one ready.”

  She spun round, tossing candle grease.

  Carne stepped forward and took the candles from her.

  Shame silenced her.

  “If I drive you back as you are, you will probably take a chill. I have only an open dog-cart.”

  “If—if it’s no trouble,” she muttered meekly.

  She followed him up a wide staircase along a corridor, where draughts shook the candle flame and uneven boards creaked at their footsteps. In the bathroom clouds of steam rose from a running tap.

  He shut her in. She heard his heavy tread along the passage. She saw the towels set out, the soap, the loofahs. On a chair lay a neat little pile of dry clothes—childish garments, wool, serge, and long brown cashmere stockings.

  There was no more spirit left in her. His thought for her comfort and the efficiency with which he had produced its requisites, together with his disdainful silence, humbled her. She was tired, she was amazed, she was beyond question.

  Without further ado Sarah bathed and changed her clothes. When she re-emerged, the house was stirring. Along the hall walked Midge, carrying carefully two silver covered dishes on an old cracked japanned tray. She set these on the dining-room table and danced forward.

  “Oh, Miss Burton, isn’t this lovely? Didn’t Elsie and I keep up good fires? We knew Daddy might be back late, but it being you to help him! And don’t my things fit you marvellously? Elsie’s going to dry your own clothes while we have breakfast.”

  Sarah looked up and saw Carne standing in the doorway re-clad and shaven looking down proudly at his daughter. She was as tall as her head mistress and flushed with excitement.

  The maid brought in the coffee and hot milk.

  “Won’t you sit down, Miss Burton?” Midge invited.

  Carne went to the windows and drew aside the curtains. The cold morning light washed the bare garden. The room faced east and north. Daffodils waved on the neglected grass. From Maythorpe Church a single bell rang for the six o’clock Easter Sunday service.

  “Sugar, Miss Burton? Half and half, Miss Burton?”

  Midge, at the over-large, half-empty table, busied herself, hostess-like, with the heavy silver.

  Lifting her eyes to Carne’s, expecting him to share her amusement, her admiration for his daughter’s precocious dignity, it was with a shock that Sarah recognised, unveiled, the bleak repulsion of his sombre enmity.

  Book Four

  PUBLIC HEALTH

  “AGENDA”

  “3. To consider a proposal from the Sub-Committee on Maternal Mortality for the building of a new maternity hospital.

  “4. To consider an application for a grant towards the £30,000 Rebuilding Fund of the Kingsport County Hospital.

  “5. To receive the report of the County Medical Officer of Health with regard to infectious diseases. . . .”

  Extract from Agenda of Public Health Special Committee, County Hall, Flintonbridge, May, 1933.

  1

  Mrs. Holly Fails Her Family

  FROM THE hour when Lydia, cycling home joyfully through the frost, found her mother in tears on the tumbled bed, life changed for her. An evil spell might have been cast upon her. She was no longer good-humoured and self-confident, assured that, in spite of present difficulty and discomfort, the future was hers and the future was good. She was afraid, and fear tormented her.

  At school she was arrogant and wilful. She scribbled obscenities in her nature-book, driving Miss Sigglesthwaite to unguessed despair. She was impertinent to Miss Parsons, noisy and undisciplined on the playing field, rough and unkind to smaller children, taking a special pleasure in tormenting Midge Carne. During the Easter term her work steadily deteriorated. She no longer wrestled with her natural faults of carelessness and disorder. Though her quick wits and retentive memory prevented her from falling to the bottom of her class, her answers lost all interest and distinction.

  “You see,” smiled Miss Jameson, “the girl’s reverting to type. You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. These slum children, they’re quick enough till adolescence, but then the trouble begins. They can’t keep it up.”

  Miss Jameson spoke bitterly. The bank management still delayed Pip’s promotion. She did not know how long she would be tied to a routine which bored her and to an authority which she found irksome. She might as well have applied for the headmistress-ship. It would have meant harder work, but Miss Burton was a slave-driver anyway. She had no sense of proportion.

  Sarah was deeply concerned about Lydia. It’s not natural, it’s not right, she told herself. I don’t believe the girl is either spoiled or satiated. There’s something definitely wrong. A boy? She remembered the precocity of Lydia’s performance at Madame Hubbard’s concert. The girl undoubtedly knew everything that was to be known about certain adult experiences. “But she’s not the boy-crazy type,” thought Sarah, “and she’s not more homosexual than any other romantic adolescent.” Lydia’s sturdiness, her clumsy hoydenish strength, her humour, her intelligence, prevented her from seeming a neurotic child. Sarah pondered and watched, disturbed yet patient, with the patience that was hers only when she dealt with young, confused, imperfect creatures.

  The Easter holidays approached, and on Easter morning Sarah’s consciousness of Lydia Holly was obliterated by her encounter with
the Carnes of Maythorpe. It was not of Lydia but of Midge and her father that she talked to her sister Pattie, to whose house she had gone immediately after Easter for a week’s change of air. Her brother-in-law went out one evening to a Masonic dinner, the children were in bed, and Sarah and Pattie sat, as they had often done, over the fire, exchanging their diverse experiences. As usual, Sarah monopolised most of the conversation.

  She described Carne—a sporting farmer, pseudo-county, with a big pale face rather like Mussolini’s—only his nose hooks a bit.

  “Handsome?”

  “Yes. Certainly. And knows it. Lord, how he knows it!”

  Sarah lay on the fur hearth-rug, plaiting its soft strands idly. Pattie, as usual, was mending socks for her family. She listened quietly to Sarah’s narrative of the adventure on Easter eve.

  “. . . So he sent a groom to fetch petrol from an inn down the village, and when we’d finished breakfast, there was my car ready, my clothes dried, everything splendid. Only—not a word of apology or thanks, Pattie. Well, he did send a stiff little note hoping I was no worse, but . . . taking everything for granted like that. . . . The arrogance of it! And I shall have to spend fortunes at the cleaners, and even so that new two-piece will never be the same again. What do you think, Pattie?”

  “That you’re inclined to be more than half in love with him, my dear.”

  “In—love!” gasped Sarah.

  She stared at her sister, then remarked mildly, “Marriage has had its usual deplorable effect on your intelligence, my poor one. Only one single idea nowadays.”

  She went on to describe Mrs. Beddows, Alderman Astell, whom she liked increasingly, and her far-off plans for a rebuilt school.

  I shall have to give up discussing personalities with Pattie, she told herself. Really she is too absurd. Yet all that night when she slept she dreamed of the governor’s dark figure towering above her in the snow, and somehow incongruously intermingled with the music of Terry Bryan’s solo from The Messiah, “I will shake the heavens and the earth, the sea and the dry land”; and when she woke she could see Carne’s profile outlined against the lantern light as he bent over the struggling terrified cow.

  I dislike, I oppose everything he stands for, she told herself—feudalism, patronage, chivalry, exploitation. . . . We are natural and inevitable enemies.

  She returned to Kiplington before term started. She had to deal with correspondence, time-tables, workmen, repairs and contracts. Colonel Collier, Mr. Tadman, and a clerk closeted themselves with Miss Parsons, going over the food contracts for the year, ordering meat for the boarders from two local butchers, lump sugar from one grocer, soft sugar from another, soap straight from the Kingsport manufacturers at a rebate, jam from a London factory, “and I know what Tadman gets out of that,” Joe Astell said darkly. Miss Parsons was helpless before governors and contractors. Sarah ached to take her place and send the squabbling incompetents about their proper business. “The local people pay the rates; they should get our contracts,” she protested. “And as for ordering raisins from one shop and ground rice from another—it’s ridiculous. Nothing but little finicking accounts with every tradesman. Why not get them all from one grocer and then take them in rotation?” But Miss Parsons was no fighter, and Sarah believed in delegation. She had to possess her soul in patience, with occasional explosions to Joe Astell.

  But she had her own troubles. The grant for her boarding-house was hideously inadequate. The place looked desolate, and she had no money to spend on decorations. She pillaged her cottage for vases, books and woodcuts. She designed cupboards, bullied local carpenters, hung pictures and curtains, pestered governors. Far into the night she sat writing letters, drafting memoranda. She dragged any member of the Higher Education Committee whom she could lure into her buildings from cellar to garret, exposing their enormities. Her energy was unremitting. If the South Riding was not prepared to build a new school for her, she would make this old one a perpetual torment. And always as she planned and wrote and argued, she saw Councillor Carne in her mind’s eye as the apostle and ringleader of reaction, the author of false economies, the culprit really responsible for leaking taps in the science room and blackbeetles in the basement. Because of this, it was a little difficult to banish the thought of’ him completely from her consciousness; but at least she never forgot to remember him with resentment.

  In spite of her preoccupations she found time to visit Lydia Holly. One day she drove along the Maythorpe road, stopped at the Shacks, and found Lydia, in a torn overall, feeding hens with some dank-smelling mash. She called, and the girl came towards her, slouching and reluctant. Sarah spoke crisply, asked how she was getting on, praised the plump hens, mentioned Lydia’s school work, asked how her mother was, and observed the girl’s awkward diffident answers.

  She felt snubbed by the lack of response, but would not force a confidence. She ended by asking Lydia to tea on Sunday, and determined to collect a group of girls to serve as an excuse for the party. She drove away, depressed and quite uncomforted; but as she turned her car she thought she saw in the doorway of the coach a woman’s drooping figure, heavily pregnant.

  Is that it? She wondered. Is that what’s worrying Lydia? Still—Sarah could not see it as a tragedy.

  She could not know that the moment she had driven away, Lydia rushed to the unoccupied railway coach used by her as a study. There, wrapped in old coats and sacking, she had found privacy throughout the winter. There she could read and write and copy out her home-work. Candles had spilled grease from the bottles in which she stuck them on to the table-flap of pot-ringed deal. Scraps of torn paper, dog-eared books and well-chewed pencils bore witness to her efforts. This was her own place.

  But there was no longer joy in its seclusion. Its promise was betrayed, its treasure rifled. Her mother was going to die. Lydia must leave school. She must come home and look after her small brother and sisters and the new baby too. There was no choice. Her mother’s sisters were both busy harassed married women with families of their own. Her father, characteristically feckless, had no kin. She would have to do it.

  She was not a religious child, and did not pray about it; she was not a self-deceiving child, and did not try to tell herself that it would be all right, that her mother would get better, and she would return to school; she was not an irresponsible child and did not dream of escaping from her obligations.

  But she saw all too clearly what must happen. “These slum children know too much,” Miss Jameson said. Lydia knew too much. Her lively imagination ran ahead and lived through the days which very soon would face her.

  Quarter to five, wake father. Put on the kettle, get his breakfast, the cocoa, the margarine, the bread. Tidy the living-room; go and wake the children; get their breakfast. (Why isn’t there no bacon? Lydie, can’t we have treacle?) See them off to school; look after Lennie and baby; tidy the bedroom, peel the potatoes, get the dinner ready, feed the hens, the pig—if they could keep one; give the children their dinner when they came home from school, noisy and ravenous. Lennie still needed his food shovelling in with a spoon; he was a slow eater; the baby would want a bottle. Wash up the dinner things; then do the shopping, pushing the pram along the dull road into Maythorpe; get the tea ready, the children are coming shouting across the fields; Daisy has fallen and cut her knee; Gertie is sick again. Bert back. Lydie, what’s for tea, old girl? Bacon cake? I’m sick of bacon cake. Can’t we have sausages? Washing the children. The heavy shallow tubs, the tepid water. Where’s the flannel gone? Don’t let Lennie eat the soap now! The tap stood up. two feet from the ground on a twisted pipe twenty yards from the door. The slops were thrown out on to the ground behind the caravans and railway coaches. Rough weeds grew there; damel and dock and nettle soaked up the dingy water, drinking grossly. Broken pots splashed in it. Rimlets of mud seeped down from it. The rusting tubs were heavy. Lydia’s strong arms ached from lifting, carrying, coping with the clamorous, wriggling children.

  And throughout th
is day of servitude there would be no mother to applaud or scold, no draggled lumpish woman whose sharp tongue cut across tedium, whose rare rough caress lit sudden radiance. Only her father’s maudlin misery or facile optimism would punctuate the days.

  And all the time the High School would be there, the morning prayers in the hall, the girls in rows, white blouses and brown tunics, neat heads bowed and lifted together; there would be the hymns, the lesson, the word of command, the note struck on the piano, then the march out to a brave tune, Pomp and Circumstance, or The Entry of the Gladiators. There would be the classes, scripture, history. This term they were going to “do” Nehemiah, the book about the gallant young prophet, the King’s Cup Bearer, who roved by night among the ruins of Jerusalem. They were to “do” the Civil Wars. Miss Burton had told them to read Browning’s Strafford, “Night hath its first supreme forsaken star.” There would be botany, physics, glorious smells and explosions in the stink room. Teasing Siggles. Good old Siggles with her fading wisps of hair. There would be tennis. Cricket. Prize-giving. Essay prize, Lydia Holly. Maths prize, Lydia Holly. Form prize. High average for the year, Lydia Holly. Sports junior championship, Lydia Holly. Oh, no, no, no, no, no! Other girls, Other girls, others who cared nothing for all these things, could have them. Jill Jackson, who only thought of hockey, Gladys Hubbard, who was going to be a singer, Doris Peckover, who has as much imagination as a clothes-horse— these would gain the marks, win the prizes, take the scholarships, be clapped at prize-giving, go on to college.

  It isn’t fair. None of them care like I do. None of them could do what I could do. I hate them.

  I hate Sarah Burton. What did she want to come here for? “Are these your hens? Is this your little brother?” As if that was all I should ever be good for again—the hens, the little brother!